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[FightyF]

In short -- it's a convergence device custom-made for the corporate market. Its whole appeal is the tight integration with corporate mail servers and easy user interface for text -- you can get your messages ANYWHERE, not just in a location with WiFi/VPN access, and respond to them quickly. It's not an ideal cellphone form factor, but that isn't the point. Email is FAR more important than phone for busy execs, but since you need the phone capability in some cases and probably don't want to carry two devices...why not bundle them?

I've realized most of your points, but not the bolded parts...thanks! The way we send emails back and forth...it's a nice international instant messenger. But that's all I've considered it to be...and I guess that's all it's supposed to be, really (phone and PDA features were probably second thoughts)

And I thought that Smartphones are capable of getting messages everywhere as well. Lyte, can you receive emails without being on a VPN or WiFi Network? I had the impression you'd use your dial up connection and leave it on.

 

[aaaaa0]

And I thought that Smartphones are capable of getting messages everywhere as well. Lyte, can you receive emails without being on a VPN or WiFi Network? I had the impression you'd use your dial up connection and leave it on.

For the Audiovox at least, there's a mode where it can talk directly to your work's Exchange email server, and it will sync with your email, contacts, and calendar every xx minutes, depending on how you configure it.

There's also a "Always Up to Date" mode where (if your email server is compatible) you can tell it to register with the email server, and it gets sent notifications whenever something arrives in your inbox, so you get an update on the phone almost instantly.

There's also no dial up connection or anything like that needed to do this. The GPRS connection is alive all the time, except when you're making a voice call. (Unlike voice calls, you're not charged for GPRS connection time, only total bytes sent/received, unless you have an unlimited plan.)

The battery life is pretty decent -- even with the GPRS connection alive and live synching, I get a couple days on standby. It drops if I do anything CPU intensive though, but that's expected -- high CPU usage will use more power.

 

[Dilbert]

But you can do all that with the Palm/Pocket PC Smartphones, and get more features as well. Is the Blackberry a cheaper product? I haven't looked at them in a long time.

Yes, you can...but I suspect that the main reason RIM is entrenched in the market is that RIM got there first. The first RIM two-way pager with a keyboard was 1996; the first Blackberry model was 1998; the first integration with corporate mail servers was 1999. On the other hand, consider where Palm was at that time: The Palm 5000 came out in 1996 (followed by the Pilot Pro in 1997), but PDAs didn't start to get popular until the Palm IIIx and Vx series came out in 1999. The first Palm OS-powered smartphone (Qualcomm PDQ) also came out in 1999, and my recollection was that it was basically a phone (numeric keypad) with a PDA screen, which you could write on with a stylus.

So, for the market of people who wanted to type email away from their desk, Blackberry was the way to go. The recent smartphones are probably equivalent...but at this point, they are fighting the fact that "Blackberry" has the same kind of status as "Kleenex" or "Coke" in the minds of its audience.