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An Inside Look At the Rise and Fall of RIM
zacharye writes with this excerpt from BGR:
"Research In Motion is in the midst of a major transition in every sense of the word. Publicly, the company is portraying a very defensive image — one that is very dismissive, as if RIM is profitable and class-leading, and the media is out of line to criticize its business, as are investors. Internally, however, there's a different story to be told. It's a story filled with attitude, cockiness, heated arguments among the executive team and Co-CEOs, and paranoia. ... The three-year roadmap for RIM products focused on refining the technology in phones had already been released, rather than looking at where to add major new componentry or trying to identify or even shape future trends. 'One of the main reasons RIM missed the mark with the browser was because
they were always proud of how little data usage a user would use,' a former executive said. 'There was no three-year plan at RIM.'"
1) The keyboards are always phenomenal. I can take notes on a blackberry quite well, keeping pace with a speaker. And the notes are always, automatically synced to the Exchange server, so I dont even have to worry about backups.
You must have womanly-small fingers. I could never use a BB keyboard without constantly getting the wrong key.My HTC Evo Shift, meanwhile, has a gloriously useful keyboard that I can take notes on better than any BB I ever had.
2) Battery life is phenomenal compared to Android power-devices. If the thing doesnt last through 8 hours of talking and data usage, then its worthless to me. Most days I dont use it quite that much, but others Im on the phone all day.
If I'm going to need 8 hours of talking and data usage, I'm going to be somewhere I can plug in. My charger is standard micro-USB, easily plugs into the car adapter, wall adapter, or the nearest device with any sort of USB plug no problem.
3) Keyboard shortcuts are phenomenal. It is trivial to fly around the menus on my Bold, compose a mail, copy/paste, bookmark and all the rest. Very little fiddling with menus.
Funny. On my Droid, the stuff I use most is trivial to get to as well. The top 8 things I do are a homescreen touch away. That's a lot of things.
4) BES is king.
You're insane. BES is expensive, barely workable, wonky as hell crap that gives our server admins nightmares.
Active-sync is nice, and has its pros (like not needing yet another server and yet 2 more GB of RAM),
That's just the beginning.
but it also has a lot of cons-- certificate woes, iPhone woes (where it simply refuses to connect, even if the certs are all correct-- could be any number of things)
Funny, we have yet to have an iPhone have a problem connecting. Likewise with Droids. Supply username, password, server name, and they sync right up.
For Blackberries, meanwhile, you have to provide:
- the EXACT https OWA link
- Username/password
- User's "box" name, which could be anything at all and is likely different from the username
- AND every time they reset their password, you don't just have to reset the stored pword on the Blackberry, you have to delete the entire account setting and re-create it to get the fucking piece of shit to resync correctly.
This is a BLACKBERRY problem, not an OWA problem.
lack of manageability, and not as many things are synced.
Email, calendar, and contacts all sync. What else are you looking to sync?
Its getting better all the time, but BES still has fewer issues, easier deployment, better security, and more management options. And the new 5.0 BES has a web-management interface which (despite being ActiveX-style crufty) is great-- allows you do manage which public folders you sync, lets you do backups, etc.
I'm now convinced you have never actually seen an AD/OWA implementation, and are simply talking out your ass.
If your idea of a smartphone is occasionally getting some emails and doing phone calls, sure, get an iPhone or Android. Some of the folks in my office have iPhones, and love them in general. But if you (like me) find yourself typing email on your phone even if theres a computer nearby, you really want to use a Blackberry. Theyre wonderful for business use, and I think it would be a mistake for RIM to start catering to home users-- theyll never beat iPhone at that game. The strength of a Blackberry is productivity.
Blackberries help with productivity? You really must be joking. We've got users defecting to iPhone and Droid models in droves, who 2 years ago insisted they loved their blackberries and would never part with them, merely because of how cranky and impossible to use their blackberries are compared to the simplicity and elegance of the iOS and Droid models.