The system
The success of RIM and BlackBerry is only one thing: this has been the first complex messaging service that solved the instant delivery of email messages in a very reliable and secure way on a handheld device. With this they have managed to label themselves in a way, as for most users BlackBerry devices have been handsets that serve a single purpose, they are perfect for messaging, but are not very good in other telephony-related features. This opinion had its reasons, as earlier BlackBerry devices (like the 7 series) have really been made in this spirit, but RIM has been trying hard to leave this idea behind; Pearl and Curve are very phone-like and Storm even bests the rival smartphones from some points of view.
The corporate method, with a BES server
The BlackBerry system had lots of variations over the time, but we can put these in two main categories. The larger one is definitely the service used by corporate customers. In this case the company Exchange (or Lotus) server is permanently connected to RIM’s headquarters in England or America (with the strong cooperation of the network operator), business mails travel around with AES or 3DES encryption from the users’ phone and the company’s messaging server. This costs quite a lot and needs some serious IT backend, but security and reliability are at their best, this is why the US government (including the president) uses BlackBerry phones.
The residential version, we have BIS instead of the BES server
What might be a better choice for our readers is the residential BlackBerry service. This requires only a mobile subscription and a BlackBerry handset, and for a couple of euros we get a mail account on RIM’s server that instantly synchronizes changes from our phone. The point of the service is that the server looks around on the POP3 accounts we’ve set up (every 15 minutes at most) and if a message arrives, it is transferred to the server and sent immediately to the user’s phone, but if the user replies to the message it will be sent from his original email address. In the case of gmail.com addresses we don’t even have the 15 minutes delay, as there is a strong cooperation between RIM and Google, the servers are continuously connected and as a mail arrives to the Google account it is instantly sent to the phone. Although this residential service doesn’t have such serious security measures as the corporate edition, it is still very popular and only those know how practical it is who have already used it.
Both solutions have a great aspect, which is the minimal amount of data traffic. The email client of an average phone has options to download only the headers, or we might set up a size limit. BlackBerry is much more intelligent, and this has a couple of reasons. On one hand it sorts out useless data from known attachment types, so an Office document’s size will be much smaller. On the other hand we don’t have to mess around with size limitations, the server sends only as much data that can be displayed on the screen. So if a user opens a couple of pages log letter with an attachment, that won’t generate a full data traffic, only as much is downloaded as it is required to see the part of the letter that is displayed on-screen. This means only a couple of bytes and it even displays fast. If we start scrolling the letter the server gives us the rest of the letter in this pace. This means a huge economy of data, as it is quite frequent that the addressee only opens up the message and then closes it, or even deletes it as it’s not that important. In this case the BlackBerry is a great companion.
So it’s not a coincidence that more and more guys with a suit and a tie are going around with a BlackBerry in their hands, while around these parts the name of the phone is only Nokia, and furthermore a RIM device is not that cheap and the software is not localized. So it stays a rarity, which makes me like it even more, but of course this is just me.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
