Blackberry (Noobie) question

[Codiac]

Hi Guys,

This Blackberry stuff everyone is chatting about is puzzling me..... :?

Now, I have never owned one, or for that matter seen one.. so my questions are:

1: What does this thing do that is so special?. I know you can get your emails delivered to it, but you can do this with the XDA via gprs/wifi.

2: What is this Blackberry plugin/software for the XDA(IIs)? does it give the same functionality as a Blackberry?

Sorry if I sound a little dumb, but I have never taken the time to look into this product and I thought this would be the ideal place for a sensible answer!

Thanks in advance chaps

[AdmiralAK]

The blackberry device is like a PDA, but with the ability to receive emails from a blackberry enterprise server (BES). This server pushes the emails to you as soon as the email arrives at the server. All email clients (by en large) query the server to see if there is email and the get it when the server says that there exists new email. With a blackberry you get the email instantly (no need to keep querying the server).

The blackberry software is supposed to allow you to get that push email access on your palm/pocket pc

personally I dont like RIM devices, they dont support non-latin characters, and I have no need for push email. My job doesnt pay me enough to have access to me 24/7 :p

[Codiac]

Thanks Admiral (Getting to be a habit this) :D

So the only real benefit is "Push" technology.....

Same here then, my job also does'nt pay me enough either! :lol:

[Anonymous]

Push email is very handy even if your job does not pay you enough to be on call 247! I spend a lot of time away from home, so use my XDA to check my personal emails as well as work! Although the IIs does not support (Yet!) blackberry you can try the duality software from Smartner. This is simple to use, and is the nearest thing to push email until the BB client becomes available. www.smartner.com

Hope that helps too.

Celtic

[xda-rocks]

What is the benefit of 'push' email over simply polling your pop server every 'x' minutes?

[ian watson]

What is the benefit of 'push' email over simply polling your pop server every 'x' minutes?

The smartner software polls the server every few mins. This costs me quite a bit over gprs, so I always connect manually when I need to. (I can change it to poll auto every 15, 30 60 mis etc.) BUT, with the smartner software it synchronises with my pop server, so if I delete from my pda it is also deleted from my pop server etc - this is what I like.

I was expecting the smartner software to have email "pushed" to it. But it seems to poll (like I said above) every few mins. Im not sure if this is "real" push email?

I have noticed Microsoft Messenger can stay connected for ages with very little data exchanged untill I get a message. I was expecting this to be the case with smartners push software.

Regards,
Ian Watson

[goestoeleven]

1. Push email (faster and more efficient)

2. Calendar / unread mark synchronization

3. Attachment viewing (the most popular file formats are all supported)

There really is nothing else that is widely deployed that does these things (or at least does them well and is an excepted corporate standard).

In the absence of the Blackberry client software, I'm using IMAP mail, which I find to be ridiculously slow when compared to my old Blackberry handheld.

[cotc2001]

So all emails have to be routed through the BB server then?? (sorry im a bit ignorant in these matters). Just interested because I run my own email server in my office (mdaemon) and all email gets routed through that and distributed to the various people in my office, so if someone wanted to use blackberry we wouldnt be able to use our mail server as well??

[markh]

If you want to access internal corporate push email you have to connect the Blackberry Enterprise Server to a mail server, it supports 3 mail servers: Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino or Novell GroupWise. If you want to access Hotmail, AOL, IMAP or POP3 you have to use Blackberry Web Client on the device which I presume is pull.

The nice thing about blackberries is they support one-handed operation like a mobile phone and have a keyboard. PPC PE should really get it's act together in terms of one handed operation.

I've setup a cheapo version of "kind-of" push email - a perl script on a server that polls a POP3 mail server every 10 minutes and sends out a txt message with subject and some of the body, can't handle HTML emails yet though.