BlackBerry flavours

by Davey Winder , Paul Ockenden on Aug 8, 2007

Tags: BlackBerry | flavours

There’s a lot to consider before jumping on the BlackBerry bandwagon. Should you or shouldn’t you use a dedicated blackberry device?

Many readers already use RIM’s BlackBerry for their mobile email, but even more of you are probably best be described as “BlackBerry curious” – you want to find out more about the BlackBerry system, how it works and which one to buy. It’s all a bit confusing, because BlackBerry comes in loads of options and configurations, and the one you choose will radically alter your user experience. In this feature, I’ll be trying to walk you through the choices at your disposal.

Like any push-email system, BlackBerry contains two main components: the device you hold in your hand and the server software that pushes email to the handset. Let’s start with the software. The two main options are BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) and the BlackBerry Web Client (BWC), which has been joined by BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS). In BlackBerry jargon, you’ll hear BES referred to as the “enterprise” product, and BWC and BIS collectively as “prosumer” solutions.

A BES-based system costs more, but provides a direct link between your handset and the enterprise’s mail server – all incoming mail is sent directly, and almost instantly, to your phone. People often notice that when working at their desks, their BlackBerry will announce a new email before Outlook has spotted it. BWC and BIS are usually a bit less instant, because they act like an email vacuum, sucking up messages from your other email accounts and forwarding them to your phone. This is done by a batch process that runs every 15 minutes or so, although this delay reduces to two or three minutes once an active conversation is in progress.

If that 15-minute delay is a problem, there’s a way to make a prosumer BlackBerry behave a bit more like the enterprise device, based on the fact that prosumer BlackBerrys have their own dedicated email account in addition to polling external accounts. The address of this account depends on your carrier. If your Blackberry is from Vodafone, it might be fred@mobileemail.vodafone.com.au. Any mail sent to this address will pop up on your BlackBerry instantly.

That’s all well and good, but if your main email address is fred@mycompany.com you don’t want to have to print the Vodafone on your business cards too. What you do is configure email forwarding on your primary mail server so that copies of every incoming message get sent to the BlackBerry account. If Exchange is your mail server, the easiest way to do this is via an Outlook rule. Once that’s working, your inbound messages will arrive on your BlackBerry almost instantly, without the expense of hosting and running a full-blown BES installation.

But what about outbound email? You’ll want that to be sent from your corporate account too, and the web interface supplied with prosumer BlackBerry accounts lets you customise the “From:” address so that outgoing emails will appear to come from your corporate email account. The final piece in the jigsaw is an Auto-CC facility, which you can also configure via the web interface so all emails you send from your handheld get copied back onto your main corporate mail server. And by creating some simple rules, you can arrange for these to be dumped in your “Sent Items” folder. Do all of that and you get BES-style email without paying for BES, which is great. A proper BES installation offers a bit more, though.

As I mentioned earlier, there are two versions of the prosumer BlackBerry software, BWC and BIS, with some important differences between them. The older BWC offers a useful webmail interface, so that as well as accessing your mailbox from the handheld you’re also able to create/reply/delete messages via any computer or handheld with a web browser. BWC has some annoyances too, like a mailbox size limit (typically 25MB) that a couple of monster attachments can quickly fill up. If that happens, you get a “mailbox full” message on your BlackBerry and no further messages will get through. Changing the “From:” address on outgoing emails is a bit clunky too – you can’t do it for single messages, but only globally via the web interface.

BWC is now superseded by BIS, which overcomes both of these problems: there’s no mailbox size limit and you can easily select which mail address to put on any individual outgoing message. The webmail system has gone, though – the only place you can see your BIS messages is on your BlackBerry – which is a shame, as it was often useful. Most new BlackBerry purchasers will find themselves using
BIS, and older users who still use BWC will probably get migrated to BIS over the coming months.

A prosumer BlackBerry is great for freelancers and very small companies, but any firm that runs its own corporate mail server will find BES a much better solution. Integration with the email system is tighter – I love the ability to toggle my “out of the office” message, or even update its wording, from my handheld, because I almost always forget to do it in Outlook before I leave the office for a few days. BES also provides full two-way wireless synchronisation of calendar, contacts, tasks and notes, and it’s gratifying to type a new appointment into your BlackBerry then see it appear almost instantly in the calendar on your PC.

That “almost” actually reveals something interesting; namely, that the whole BlackBerry system is designed to employ as little over-the-air data as possible. As I’m sure you know, wireless data is sent in packets, and a small edit to your BlackBerry calendar probably isn’t going to fill a whole packet, so it will hold on for a few seconds to see whether there’s any more data coming that it can pack in. This data efficiency works in the other direction too. Whenever you receive an email, only the first part is delivered, enough for a few screenfuls, and as you scroll downwards the handheld keeps requesting the server to swend the next chunk. The same goes for attachments: if you view a PowerPoint presentation or Word document, it gets downloaded one page at a time, so if you only view the front page that’s all you’ll pay for. This means that even a very heavy user of email can get away with around 6MB of data per month – most other push-email systems are nowhere near so efficient.

This article appeared in the September 2007 issue of PC Authority.