Slashdot Mirror
First 3G BlackBerry Announced
An anonymous reader writes "The Register is featuring an article on Research In Motion's first 3G BlackBerry, due shortly for release in the UK via Vodafone. The big news is that it contains an integrated 3G data modem - meaning UK addicts will be able to connect from the device and their laptop (via USB/BlueTooth) at 3G broadband speeds. No EDGE so the US will have to carry on waiting, but for those in the UK and Europe, short of integrated GPS, is the BlackBerry 8707v finally the first example of mobile device convergence everyone has been waiting for?"
No, that would be the Treo. And we stopped waiting a while ago.
I've never tried a Blackberry myself, but I've heard from someone that Email is the only thing it does right. Is that the general consensus? I'm using my Treo 650 for my (very) occasional mobile email needs, and SnapperMail is working great for me. And as a Palm, I find it a great PDA.
Maan
From looking at the market and hardware available, there's no one device which does anything and everything the "ultimate mobile device" would do. What I do see, is a few devices which merge some features, but miss out others.
For example, this new Blackberry device gives instant email, phone service, and 3G data access, but it's big and bulky and doesn't feature a mobile camera. The Nokia N-Series provides smartphone capability using Series 60, multimedia features, and high spec cameras, but it's small and only has a standard mobile phone keyboard.
The above examples are the way I see the mobile device market going; there will be many devices which offer convergence in many different ways. But, I don't see it possible to create a "one device fits all" type handset, purely because there are so many different market sections and types of people who use them.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
Nope. For that it needs to support my 1GB mini-sd card so I can carry around MP3's for my commute like my Cingular 2125 does. It's not the most featureful music player since it's really a phone, but it works and keeps me from lugging around multiple devices. You'd think that with the wheel on the side the Blackberry would be perfectly suited for this task and do it as well as it does email. Oh well. They're decent phones, fantastic for email, and suck at most anything else.
their phones look and act as if it was the 90's
So? some people like new tech in old packages.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
By positioning the 3g phone as a high speed modem, blackberry is doing something very significant: it is saying that the best thing about 3g is not that you can watch movies or do video calling on a phone screen , it's the sheer access to bandwidth wherever and whenever you want.:)
Depends on what you call convergence. I call convergence a handheld that's reasonably small, handles data and voice, gives me real-time access to my e-mail, and serves as an effective adjunct to my laptop. And I call that a GSM Treo 650 - which I've owned for the better part of a year. With the addition of a quality IMAP-based e-mail client instead of Versamail, the Treo gets messages as they arrive, can do real background processing, and give me easy access and editing of all my accumulated information. If I wanted to, I could use the built-in camera to take pictures, and capture lo-res video to my SD card.
To me, that's convergence. The only thing it lacks is support for the higher-speed cellular broadband standards (and enough internal RAM), but the Treo 700w (Windows Mobile-based) works with the CDMA EV/DO service from Verizon, and the forthcoming 700p (PalmOS) is expected to work with Sprint's EV/DO network. GSM EDGE versions of both are slated to arrive pretty soon as well.
And the Blackberry that's covered here? That's the tip of the iceberg. The CTIA Wireless show is in Vegas less than two weeks from now. And there's sure to be quite a few relevant announcements there. I'm holding my breath for a ExpressCard-based EV/DO card, though - My MacBook Pro is on order and I'd rather use a card than tether a phone (I use a PC5220 card from Verizon right now with my existing PowerBook).
The ultimate definition? Convergence is a state of mind. And when your device does all the things you need, it matches that.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The big news is that it contains an integrated 3G data modem - meaning UK addicts will be able to connect from the device and their laptop (via USB/BlueTooth) at 3G broadband speeds
<br><br>
And the only thing faster than the connection will be the speed at which the bill rises.
Beep beep.
Where I live (not USA), the thing that is holding back new devices is the insane connectivity costs imposted by the mobile companies. 3g and the trimmings is out unless it is on business expenses. Using an "ordinary" old mobile is expensive enough. Naturally if you impose a greed-crazed charging structure like this, as if megabytes were as rare and precious as diamonds, there will appear to be no demand for all-in-one devices, phones with mp3 players, etc. Someone, somewhere will suss this eventually and if they make a fortune by breaking up the cosy club and bringing all-in-one to the mass market they will thoroughly deserve it.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Not true...
Ever hear of the HTC Universal (XDA Exec, Qtek 9000, T-Mobile MDA Pro, I-Mate Jasjar, etc)?
VGA screen, 520mhz processor, 3G (UTMS/HSDPA), WiFi, Bluetooth, dual cameras for video-conferencing, Windows Mobile 5.0, 128MB of RAM (I believe), and a SD slot.
It also has a swivel screen that opens up into a full QWERTY keyboard. The screen flips around and covers the keyboard for portrait/phone usage (although there is no number pad, which I guess could be a little annoying for some people).
If I had to pick a super device that does everything... I'd choose this one. If I had the money ($700+ on eBay), I'd pick myself up one... but I'd like some hands-on testing first, and sadly as they're not sold in the US, I'm never going to get to try before I buy.
Don't get me started on how well these things perform as phones. With the exception on the 7100 series, Blackberries are generally awful as phones. The form factor is all wrong, the UI is all wrong, it's just plain wrong. Put your voice plan on a decent wireless phone, and put the data plan on the Blackberry if you must have one. Of course if you're going to go this route, and don't need live access to your email, then forget the Blackberry, get a Bluetooth phone, a Bluetooth PocketPC or Palm, and access the net through the phone.
I can only second that, I don't understand what all the fuss is about. The Blackberry is really a rather mediocre package which makes me wonder why it is so popular. I have used the Blackberry but ditched it in favor of a PocketPC PDA phone which does not have push mail but is in every other respece superior to the Blackberry, as an organizer, an email client, it is pretty equal as a telephone and now that Exchange 2003 with push-mail is available even the Blackberry service is losing it's appeal. Blackberry fans keep telling me their 72xx, 77xx or 87xx series phones are smaller and weigh less than my PDA phone but when I put it down on the table and physically compare the two the difference betwen the bigger (supposedly so small and neat) model of Blackberry phone and my (supposedly big as a king-sized club sandwich) PDA phone is marginal. Also keep in mind that my PDA phone is OLD, these days, you can actually get PDA phones with Windows Mobile 5, Linux or some other OS installed that are both ligher and handyer than the Blackberry plus the ones with Windows Moble 5 into the bargain are also push mail capable vis-a-vi an Exchange 2003 server.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I suppose because the 8707v (Vodafone) is being released in Britain that's implied already. But "3G" isn't a single technology, and in fact the BlackBerry 7130e - which has been commercially available in Canada, the US, and Australia for a while - uses the CDMA2000 standard (with 1xEV-DO technology), which is also considered 3G.
So this isn't the "first 3G Blackberry". It is however, the first UMTS BlackBerry, which would make it the first BlackBerry to support 3G in the UK (and other places).
Also saying "no EDGE so the US will have to carry on waiting" sort of neglects the fact the the 8700c (Cingular) available in the US and the 8700r (Rogers) available in Canada do in fact have EDGE - they just don't have the same "integrated 3G data modem".
I think I will prefer getting the same features plus memorystick support for my MP3s in the pretty cool looking Sony Ericsson M600: http://www.sonyericsson.com/spg.jsp?cc=gb&lc=en&ve r=4000&template=pp1_loader&php=php1_10385&zone=pp& lm=pp1&pid=10385
The concept of convergence depends wholly on your personal needs, and based upon the posts so far, seem to have a lot to do with the BlackBerry vs the devices running Windows Mobile and Symbian that tend to have a lot more add-ons that people add into their personal definition of convergence.
RIM have built up a critical mass of customers because lots of companies and organisations really don't want devices with removable media or integrated cameras because it would break every security rule they have. They want end-to-end encyrption of internal e-mails that are necessarily deflected outside the LAN to mobile devices without having to install and support additional layers on their server and clients to try and do that job. They want the ability to lock then remotely wipe a device when its left down the side of a chair. They don't want the support calls after meddling users play with the device configurations while sat waiting for the gate to be called at the airport. Most certainly don't want to pay for data so users can download mp3s and amusing avis on their company device.
For the majority of mainstream business users, the idea of a 3G BlackBerry is incredible. Users moaning that BlackBerry e-mails only supports plain text (ps - it is a pain!) might be forgetting that with 7x the bandwidth, moving "bulky" HTML around is no longer an issue and so will likely be supported sometime soon. Attachments, the annoyance of all mobile devices (how do you download to review that huge presentation?), suddenly become a lot less scary. Users will be able to ride off the back of their 3G BlackBerry via their laptop to connect securely to the company LAN via the built-in BlackBerry Mobile Data Service and will remove VPN and security issues to access company intranet sites.
For those who do miss add-ons like digital cameras, the BlackBerry could connect (when the centrally managed IT policy allows) to a BlueTooth-compatible digital camera (a camera that will always be able to have a much better feature set then the rather inadequate ones currently found squeezed into phones and PDAs)? And with the broadband connection from the device, the pictures will be easier to move around.
For them, they bought the 7100 to finally get one device that could do a proper job of handling voice and e-mail/PIM. Now, a device with the specifications of the 8707v means they can have one device that expands the e-mail and PIM abilities, allows for faster secure browsing of the company intranet sites, and makes the laptops broadband-fast without the need for the separate 3G data card - the data card you couldn't give most of the executives because their 0.5oz supermodel-slim laptops didn't come with a PCMCIA slot!!
The point of convergence for this set of people - with this device, for now - is 95% there. Once a device with GPS comes out that will allow these users to route from A->B without the need for a in-car or portable sat nav... wow!
Convergence for the more technical users of mobile devices often does mean the need for removable media, the ability to properly support multimedia, lots of menus full of settings to play with, hackable firmware (alright, an "open" architecture), the choice of ways of being to able to fully access, for example, IMAP accounts - its what we are used to and what we need. I think, in short, it means having access to as many of the things on the handheld device as we're used to being able to use on our desktops... well, aside from monitor size and 7 speaker set up!
The point of convergence for most of us will always be another handful of device features away.
With OS 4.02 or higher, the 7250 supports EVDO. You just have to make sure before you load the newer OS that you contact your provider and make sure your account is set up to allow EVDO otherwise you'll get "Data Connection Refused" when trying to transmit data. Check out blackberryforums.com to get more info.
I have a HTC Universal, and trust me, this thing really does have it all. It's so powerful it can play 700MB XVID movies WITHOUT having to re-encode them like you have to do on almost all other devices, and battery life is many orders of magnitude better than all laptops.
It comes with Skype and MSN pre-installed in ROM usable over wi-fi or 3G, so you can war-drive, chat to your mates, video conference, VNC or RDP into a desktop PC, GPS navigation for your car, hell there is hardly anything this device cannot do.
Why Americans seem so obsessed with these pathetic little Blackberries I do not know - you enjoy your "email" while I have fun with Skype, MSN, IRC, VNC, RDP, etc. at 640x480 over 3G/wi-fi on my HTC Universal.
The blackberry is not a consumer device. It is a business device. Hence, no mp3 player, no camera, no third party software installed by default save for java to run the apps.
RIM is just starting to think about the consumer market with its 7100 series. It's the first "phone-like" blackberry.
Blackberries have always been targetted at business users. That means it has to work well and it has to work all the time. A blackberry does both. It handles email like a champ, makes calls without a problem, and gives you access to the web when you need it in a decent mobile browser. Now, according to the article there's an integrated 3G modem, meaning business types will be able to use 3G networks on their laptops, just by syncing via bluetooth to their blackberry. This makes it an even BETTER business device.
If you only consider what it was meant to do, Blackberry is best of breed.