Slashdot Mirror
Research In Motion To Be Sold, Possibly To Samsung
New submitter ve6ay writes "The talk of the tech world over the past day is that RIM, struggling mightily in these last months, was in talks to be bought either partially or wholly by Samsung. Sources at the Boy Genius Report indicate that while RIM may be trying to sell, it is asking way too much for itself."
Old news is even denied by Samsung.
This rumor has already been dashed:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/top-business-stories/which-idiots-bought-rim-shares-on-one-shaky-rumour/article2306353/
As someone who works with mobility products in Fortune-50 business, I can tell you that Apple cares quite deeply for the enterprise. They just have a starting point of a consumer device, but with every software release it adds more and more of what enterprise wants. They are asking, enterprise is answering, and Apple is changing their stuff to suit.
RIM is not, and that's why RIM is dying.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Yup. I do IT support, and we support blackberries, iPhones, Android phones, etc. From my point of view, here's the breakdown:
Blackberry: People tell us they buy them because they're super-reliable business phones with lots of security features, but no one uses those security features and we get constant complaints about devices crashing, email not sending, and email not downloading. It's a headache to troubleshoot because of the weirdness of the setup-- resending service books, deactivating/reactivating phones is a hassle. Then every once in a while, every Blackberry in the world stops working because RIM essentially engineered a single point of failure for no apparent reason.
Android: Generally hard to support because there are so many models and they might be very different. How do you set up [x] on phone [y]? I don't know. I have to look it up because who knows which version of Android is installed or what UI customizations the manufacturer put on top of them? Most likely, I won't find good online instructions, so I'll need to get the phone in my hands and fiddle with it myself before I can say how to do anything with it. Other than that, they're kind of mostly fine. Some are good, but some are crap.
iPhone: If you don't have a specific reason to get a different kind of smartphone, just get an iPhone. They work. They're stable. There's a lot of development for the platform, and lots of things are well supported. I get very few complaints that aren't something obscure (e.g. why can't I sync Exchange public folders to my iPhone?), and most people are ultimately happy with them, even when they didn't think they would be ahead of time. I can tell you how to set up your email on an iPhone without looking it up, because it's the same on every iPhone and iPad. Email doesn't mysteriously stop syncing-- if it stopped syncing, you probably don't have reception or a Wifi connection. It's almost that simple.