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AOL Dropping RIM for Danger Sidekick
Eponymous Meow Word writes "After trying to cut the cord for wireless e-mail with RIM, AOL is pulling the plug on its mobile communicator, citing a move away from its older wireless technology. The disgruntled can get a discount on a shiny new T-Mobile color Sidekick." Wireless email is a rather small niche, and it's cool that current users won't be left high and dry, but it looks like they'll have to pay some money to continue using the service.
Don't forget about AOL Communicator, the Mozilla-based AOL email client. Hopefully they don't decide to drop this project too, in favor of Microsoft-based solutions. Pushing AOL Communicator would push Gecko onto millions of subscribers' computers, and possibly allow for choice of rendering engine.
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Free pr0n.
....Why RIM (research in motion's) device is being terminated could be because RIM lost a patent lawsuit against NTP. NTP is a patent holding company which claims to hold patents to "sending text data through wireless" or some such sort. NTP was awarded $23 million in damages and has sued again tripling the damages.
:(.
Is this fair ? you ask. Let me remind you about fivolous lawsuits initiated by RIM against palm and handspring because RIM claimed to hold a patent which covers attaching a keyboard to a mobile device !!. Handspring and palm decided to settle out of court, paid RIM a wad of money and "licenced" the "technology". Evidently what goes around comes around.
I still have one of those horrible devices, because we're required to have it at work. At first, I thought it was really useful, but after a while I grew to think of it as useless, and later just a pain to have.
The device itself is horrendously overpriced: it's just an embedded 386-based handheld running WinCE. So not only does it not have enough horsepower to do anything besides text messaging, it's running WinCE so it crashes all the time. It's really annoying when you're typing an email and it spontaneously reboots itself. For such a low-tech device, it cost our company $350. And then the service is $50/month per device.
On top of this, there were all kinds of problems when they first set us up with them; the devices didn't work for weeks while they got all the problems sorted out with the Exchange servers. Real smart: make your devices only interface to MS's unreliable email servers. Even better, MS is competing directly with RIM in the wireless messaging field, and since MS controls the underlying software, guess who's going to have an advantage?
By contrast, I can get a color-screen mobile phone for under $100 now, and the service is only $40/month. Unlike Blackberry, which only does text messaging, and only works in large metro areas, my cellphone lets me talk, and works everywhere in the country. My cellphone also has an application to synchronize with my calendar at work if I wanted to use that. So why would I want to pay a premium for a Blackberry?
I'm glad I'm not the one paying for this crappy thing.