David M Williams
Monday, 06 July 2009 19:20
Opinion and Analysis
Page 4 of 5
Secondly, the BlackBerry lets you organise e-mail just how you like. In my travels I’ve come across users who wanted their BlackBerry inbox to be like a “to do” list. Ideally, to them, their inbox will be clear each day. Yet, they don’t want to genuinely delete e-mail from Outlook, just from the handheld.
In this case, you simply opt to have items delete only on the handheld. Sometimes you may wish to delete the mail from Outlook too; if you’re of that ilk you can set the BlackBerry to prompt you each time you delete.
Windows Mobile and the iPhone only give one choice which is that your inbox on the device exactly mirrors your inbox in Outlook. Delete an item on the smartphone and it deletes out of your actual mailbox too.
Personally, I do like my deletions to be reflected in both my mailbox and on the handheld but even so the ActiveSync solution still lets me down because it requires on-device retention to be set in terms of number of messages and/or number of days.
By contrast, the BlackBerry allows me to keep messages on my device for as long as the available memory permits. I carry thousands of e-mails on my BlackBerry and can find past e-mails within seconds, going back months and months. The iPhone just doesn’t allow me to do this. In fact, it wasn’t until the release of the version 3.0 OS software that you could even perform a rudimentary search!
There are so many reasons I could continue with. The BlackBerry keypad is tactile and responsive. I can – and genuinely do – type thousands of multi-page e-mails. I don’t even need to look at the screen.
I can’t do this on the iPhone. The touch screen demands you look at it and the keyboard placement has no physical feedback meaning it is easy to make typing errors, and it is slow and painful to attempt any e-mail of reasonable length. The iPhone hampers my e-mail output.
Without modification, the iPhone’s push mail will only synchronise the inbox on the fly. As soon as you open a different folder, including Sent items, you’re back to polling and waiting for the unit to catch up.
From a security standpoint the central administration options of the BES are indispensable in a corporate environment. The option to remotely lock and/or wipe a device, along with the built-in encryption, give peace of mind if a unit is lost or stolen.
From a pricing point of view the BlackBerry offers reliable regular billing irrespective of usage. This is an argument that all CFOs and CIOs and COOs must pay attention to. If you deploy a BlackBerry you know what it will cost every month because around the world telcos offer flat corporate pricing plans.
This is BlackBerry-specific. Think about it for a moment.
