Paul Ockenden concludes his trial of mobile email systems. Guess which he likes best.
The third push-email system I’ve been testing for a month is BlackBerry Connect. This is the little cousin to proper BlackBerry devices like my Pearl and the new 8800, so I hoped it might offer me the multiplatform advantages of Good and Microsoft with the comfort and familiarity of the BlackBerry system. Multiplatform ability it certainly delivered, as BlackBerry Connect, like Good, provides BlackBerry push email on handhelds from various other manufacturers. My main test was on Nokia’s E61, but I also tried it on a Windows Mobile powered device.
BlackBerry Connect is an interesting solution: unlike Good, it doesn’t supply its own mail-client environment, but instead offers a conduit for communication between your handheld and a BlackBerry server (be that a corporate BES or a small business/consumer running the Internet-based BIS). Whenever an email arrives, this conduit simply stuffs the message into the mail client already provided by your handheld, which has both pros and cons. The main pro is that if you’re using your phone to collect normal POP3 or IMAP email as well as your BlackBerry mail, it’s all done via a single client application with a single user interface. Contrast this with Good, where your corporate email might appear in one application and your personal email in something completely different, which can get a bit confusing. The main con is that if your handheld has a poor built-in email client, you’re stuck with it, as it’s the only app BlackBerry Connect will talk to. But that’s just the start of a list of shortcomings that make BlackBerry Connect a poor cousin to the proper BlackBerry device.
My main bugbear is that Connect lacks all those nice things that have made BlackBerry such an attractive and addictive push-email system. You don’t get the BlackBerry operating system, famed for ease of use and navigation. You don’t get those little touches like holding down a key to capitalise it, or just using the spacebar in email addresses and letting the software fill in the dots and @ signs. Another important thing you don’t get is wirelessly synchronised contacts. BlackBerry Connect supports email and calendar only, so no tasks or notes either. And a BlackBerry Connect device can’t be provisioned over the air – you need to tether it to a PC to get things up and running. Also missing is the BlackBerry Mobile Data System (MDS), which allows secure access from the mobile into apps on your corporate network, and permits the device to route its entire web browsing through your corporate security systems. I guess this must be related to the lack of MDS, but there’s no ability to do automatic wireless backups of the device either.
As you can probably tell from this list of negatives, I wasn’t particularly impressed with BlackBerry Connect. If I’d never used any push-email system before, it would probably have knocked my socks off, but having used Direct Push, Good and various proper BlackBerrys I found the current version of BlackBerry Connect a real letdown. In fact, I found it so frustrating I didn’t manage to survive the whole month, and within a couple of weeks had switched back to my Pearl.
Now that my three-month (well, two-and-a-half) experiment is over, what conclusions can I draw? First, I reckon that for most enterprise-class mobile email requirements you still can’t beat a proper BlackBerry. That isn’t to say the BlackBerry system is perfect. I could fill a whole column with things I’d like to improve and, if I had to score it, it would get 75-80%. Good would get around 75%, Microsoft Direct Push would get 65-70% and BlackBerry Connect about 55%. It isn’t easy to quantify what makes BlackBerry my preferred choice, but I think the built-in factor is important. RIM designs the whole system, from the software that runs in your enterprise to the mobile mail client and the handhelds themselves, so it all seems to gel much better than other solutions I’ve tried. But RIM needs to keep on its toes, because the Good client and server software are both impressive, and Microsoft will continue to throw serious money at its solution to catch up.
RIM also needs to get a new version of Connect out as soon as possible, one that addresses the various shortcomings I highlighted above. So, for the time being, I think my company will be staying with proper BlackBerrys, but the competition is starting to look tough and I wouldn’t bet money on whether I’ll be saying the same thing a year from now.
Crackberry
Just one final word of warning: that joking name of CrackBerry wasn’t awarded without reason. These things can become horribly addictive, to the point where I’ve actually caught myself answering emails in the loo, or checking for messages as soon as my eyes open in the morning. This doesn’t feel like a problem to me, but annoys the hell out of my wife. I met a friend the other day who’d had his BlackBerry for less than 24 hours and it had already caused a row between him and his partner. All the technical stuff I’ve covered in this article is important, but this last point is probably the most important thing you need to consider before jumping on the BlackBerry bandwagon. Do you really need another bad habit?