Blackberry -what's so special?

Brum Man

Brum Man

Brum Man

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30 Jan 2004
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As above really, I konw nothing about blackberry phone and was just wondering what was so special about them? Are they a direct replacement for a phone that just offers more functionality, or are they just for e-mail purposes? What makes them so special e-mail wise?

You might notice that I have been asking a lot of questons about a large variety of phones recently, the reason being that I'm bored with my current phone, and also bored with a phone just being, well, a phone :p

The only features that I really currently use on my 6230 is the text message and call functionality, but am looking for something that will give me a bit more.
 
Most businesses who use them primarily use them with the intention of having their corporate email available to them on the go (eg. being able to use them in conjunction with their Exchange or Domino servers).

I have used them quite a bit and they do the job well but when they go wrong they can be a pain to fix. (Ie Sync issues).
 
The biggest difference is that Blackberry, in connection with the server-side software, "pushes" emails to your phone just like SMS rather than the previous method of polling the email server at set intervals to check whether you have new emails.

Just as an example, imagine you have a 10-minute frequency to check emails on a non-Blackberry PDA which will check at 13:00 and 13:10.

Say you receive a new email at 13:05.

On a Blackberry, it will have the new email available for viewing at 13:05 because the new email is pushed to the handset. On a non-Blackberry, you will only find out you have a new email at 13:10, when the handset next checks for new emails.

But Blackberry is no longer the sole provider of push-emails so you will soon find such capability on MS and Nokia products as well.

Anyway, that was the overall concept of Blackberry emails - you receive emails on your handset as soon as they arrive. The handsets themselves are also very much geared towards emails, with an emphasis on keyboard and text input. I don't think they are particularly interesting as a phone, though.
 
As an e-mail tool they are excellent.
The system works on "push" so there is no logging in to collect e-mail, no need to negotiate VPN's, have e-mail servers in DMZ's etc.
You configure everything and all of your e-mail is automatically pushed out to your Blackberry device.
This really comes into its own when combined with something like an Exchange Server.
We first started rolling them out to users a little while back.
Initially the handsets didn't go down too well - ofr e-mail they were perfect but as a phone they lacked something.
We've now replaced half of the handsets with a different model and users are finding these better as phones - ironically they lose something in the e-mail department.
 
Sorry to dig a slightly old thread out.

I've been looking at one of these. Say if I was on a £25 per month contact, do I have to pay extra for email connectivity and web browsing? Or is it all included?
 
Technically you have to pay for your data usage, but most Blackberry business plans include at least 40MB of data as standard.
 
JonRohan said:
I thought that would be the case. Its not all that clear on some phone retailer websites.
Click to expand...

However make sure you have it in writing just how much data transfer is included.
It is potentially a hidden cost and the most expensive "extra" that the telco's charge.
 
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