BlackBerry Blackout?
Posted by Harry McCracken | Monday, January 23, 2006 6:48 PM PT
The Supreme Court has
refused to hear BlackBerry maker RIM's appeal in the patent cast brought against it by a tiny Virginia company called NTP that says that the insanely popular wireless e-mail gasgets violate one of its patents. In theory, we could be heading towards a shutdown for BlackBerry service, though RIM says it has a backup plan, and I still can't quite envision all this legal tussling ending in the BlackBerry perishing. (You gotta think that it's in the interests of both RIM and NTP to strike a deal if NTP prevails.)
If there is any sort of BlackBerry outage, there are a heck of a lot of people out there--including many of my coworkers and my own mom--who will have a hard time figuring out how to get any work done. Which is pretty amazing given that the human race seemed to manage pretty well until the late 1990s without 'em.
Me, I've somehow avoided joining the BlackBerry era, so I'm watching all of this with detached interest. I'm a Treo 650 owner, and I use a Cingular service called XPressmail to do work e-mail and calendaring on my phone. I have been looking forward, however, to the arrival of BlackBerry Connect, a piece of software designed to let Treos talk to BlackBerry services. It's due Real Soon Now, and I'm not sure how the courtroom wrangling will impact its fate.
Any BlackBerry addicts out there? Are you dejected or serene that things will work out? And if you didn't have a BlackBerry, what would you do?
lol
I called TMobile today and they had a generic statement issued.
I have never seen any advantage of the Blackberry over the Treo. The Palm OS has many more available applications, and setting up "Auto-Sync" in the Treo's email application seems to me preferable to the Blackberry's "magical" ability to update more often. My desktop computer's email client checks for new mail every five minutes; why should my mobile device have to get mail updates more often than that? It's certainly not a worthwhile trade-off for the versatile and well established Palm OS.
The Treo's standard email client is also easier to configure than the Blackberry's unnecessary trick, and can be easily configured to multiple email accounts, including, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.
I for one would be happy if the Blackberry went away and perhaps people would realize that standard POP email is better than some proprietary trick that requires an expensive back-end server.
a friend works at tmobile, they are giving blackberrys away to employees
ill stick with my sidekiik, no one is trying to shut them down for intellectual property issues, alot cooler same functions works for me
Maybe they will buy up NTP. Sure would be a waste if they shutdown.
I'll stick to my cell phone...call me if you can....only when I'm making money with you will you get through to me anyway...Blackberry never made me more money than I make already. Oh, I know, it's so much more than that...yeah, sure...another pathetic toy for losers on the go....time is money, don't waste it (time) on a Blackberry...or a treo....
From an enterprise security and management perspective the BlackBerrys offer true security functions...Like a kill option and true security if the device is tampered with. the other devices don't have live work intra-net web server connections or interfaces with internal applications like BB.
IF you don't understand why the corporate world or government are using them your likely just a regular home user and don't care about security like Paris Hilton and you know what happened to her address and phone book!
Dave
whatever....Palm OS sucks....Blackberry rocks, I hope they don't shut down the service, this is a very popular service that millions of people use. 75% of the exec staff in the major corps use blackberry's over any other handheld. don't shut it down.
Dave, excelente point made!!!
I have to say this about you BB haters....you all have no freakin clue....if you want real time connections to your corp email, blackberry is the way to go...Palm OS Treo is garbage....I've had them all, I am a senior manager at a major government contractor, get close to 1000 emails a day from my government client and from my employees. I will pick BB over the Treo any day of the week. One it's real time, two you don't that that crappy connection thing every few min. If they shut down BB a lot of people are going to be pissed off. I have to say this....BB has changed the way many major companies do business, I know it has changed the way I do. It has made me more money, so for all you non believers I say Peace....stop hating, and and learn what you are missing.
Blackberry for Life :)
Singh
lol
A thousand emails a day? And you remain productive? Sounds like a lot of excessive communication that would slow down my productivity.
I get a thousand spams per day. My Blackberry allows me to delete them while sitting in traffic, listening to my boss drone on and on about strategy, etc.
I get about 800 emails a day as a TV Producer. I believe the 1000 a day from Sign...
Crackberry...you never here about the treo being adidictive...
Folks, you put GoodLink on the Treo, you have an industry standards based solution that does what Blackberry does, in some cases, better.
This is funny... my company decided that I should have a Blackberry and gave me my new 7520 on the very day this news item came out.
i just got one. i am an insane man. looks like the clowns will prevail. where are my oranges?