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Palm VII vs BlackBerry
An anonymous reader wrote in to send us a summary of the
Palm VII vs the BlackBerry wireless devices.
Talks about which would be the better appendage, and the BlackBerry tends to
win out- although I've never seen one in person so I can't
attest to which is superior.
It's a lot more expensive here in Canada. Cantel has it at CAD$50/month for 500K + 0.10/K over that. Ugh. Usually Canada has cheaper communications rates than you guys in the states.
You can definitely write user apps for blackberry. If I could get American prices, I'd probably hook up my wearable to a blackberry and I could get rid of my analog cell phone & modem.
Or maybe not. Hopefully PCS data prices will come down soon when Clearnet & Fido get their data networks running, so Bell has some competition. The cool thing about PCS is that you have two communications methods: PCS data & SMS. SMS is great for email as its always on. PCS data gets you a lot higher bit rate for surfing. (14.4Kbps woohoo!)
You don't have to use Blackberry: You can get PCMCIA modems for the same network (Mobitex), Dunno about Linux drivers.
It sounds like 3Com is putting in their own network. New York only. Ugh.
Come on everybody, buy stuff like this! Until a major display breakthrough, there aren't going to be enough of us 'borgs out here to drive the price down, so we depend on you!
The Blackberry is being marketed as a replacement for the Palm Pilot, however I think it is more of a glorified alphanumeric pager than a PDA. For one thing, the Blackberry is only 3.5" x 2.5" big, and has a querty keyboard (not that it is actually useful, unless you have little twig fingers) which leaves only a small amount of screen space for stuff like email. Also, this product is nowhere near as versitile as a Palmpilot (as far as I can tell from their rather skimpy and overly sales oriented white paper).
The white paper also makes some pretty astounding claims. For instance, they claim to be able to run a cell modem equipped device for ~41 days on a single AAA battery.
Bottom line, I'd like to see one of these puppies in action before I decide to buy one, and even then it will only be a supplement to the Palm pilot I also want to buy.
I read the internet for the articles.
The technically interesting stuff on the BlackBerry is to be found here. (Needs Acrobat Reader).
It uses BellSouth Wireless Data's "Intelligent Wireless Network" to "serve 93% of the urban U.S. business population, which covers 266 metropolitan statistical areas across the country, as well as major transportation corridors and more than 130 of the nation's top airports." Gosh.
But it looks like it's completely tied in to M$ Exchange/Outlook so Slashdotters should probably look elsewhere. (Or start doing some reverse engineering?)
Regards, Ralph.
One unfortunate thing about the Blackberry is that it requires Outlook, a M$ product. Not good for us alternative OS geeks...
The problem with requiring Outlook is that it
isn't open source and doesn't run under Linux. Writing in to explain that no, it requires either Exchange or Outlook doesn't change the fact that
this limitation sucks. Hopefully it will be relaxed in the future.
(And doesn't the Microsoft Exchange version cost $2999?)
After reading the review, I have to suggest that it is a very poor piece of analysis, or is not very good at explaining itself. It purposely limits the analysis to those qualities where the Blackberry excels over the Palm, and quickly glosses over the Palm's other features.
It is fairly obvious that the Blackberry is a better remote e-mail system (price be damned), but that has always been a peripheral goal for the Palm platform. This is like suggesting that Perl is a better web scripting language than C++.
Something that this article hinted at is that you have to have a desktop machine constantly attached to the net running the Redirector. I know that most of my geek friends have DSL or cable modems, but for the average small business joe, this just isn't practical.
As an aside, I don't care if I can get double my Graffiti speed on the thing, I still wouldn't want to answer e-mail with less than my 100wpm keyboard speed - Id wnd up ansrng my mail lk ths.
l8r
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Blackberry doesn't necessarily require you to use Outlook. It requires either (a) that you connect to a Microsoft Exchange server to get your mail, or (b) that your host is running the BlackBerry Server software. The difference is either having your desktop or the server do the mail redirection for you. Personally I use NTEmacs to handle all my mail, and I have my BlackBerry running off a server, so I never have to fire up Outlook.
Yes, I work for RIM. No I'm not a company spokesman. Yes, I think BlackBerry is useful. No, I'm not an evangelist.
Viktor Haag