I used to think the same thing. I have a basic e-mail client on my cell phone and it checked for new messages every 10 minutes or so, so I didn't think that a Blackberry could do much better. I was looking to buy a new phone with better e-mail capabilities and, with Palm's ongoing support for the Palm OS in question and Windows Mobile 5 not out for phones until Q1 2006, I finally settled on a Blackberry 7105. Our Exchange server has the Blackberry Enterprise Server, so it was a simple process to activate the phone against our server.
It took about 2 minutes for me to just say "WOW!". The phone immediately dowloaded my contacts, calendar, mail and tasks and updates to any of those are immediately synchronized between devices. Mail arrives on my Blackberry BEFORE it shows up in my Outlook inbox. None of these features will be available natively in Exchange until Exchange 2003 SP2 AND Windows Mobile 5 are both available.Navigation is an absolute breeze and there are no useless games or cameras to clutter things up.
Now, I can be away from my office for business or personal errands and still feel that I'm completely available and productive.
In short, there is a lot more to Blackberry than just e-mail and bigshot execs and the vast majority of it doesn't become obvious until after you have actually used it. If Blackberry is gone in the US, there is really nothing that can directly replace it until some time next year, and even then it will take an upgraded Exchange server and brand new Windows Mobile 5 phones to do so.
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I used to think the same thing. I have a basic e-mail client on my cell phone and it checked for new messages every 10 minutes or so, so I didn't think that a Blackberry could do much better. I was looking to buy a new phone with better e-mail capabilities and, with Palm's ongoing support for the Palm OS in question and Windows Mobile 5 not out for phones until Q1 2006, I finally settled on a Blackberry 7105. Our Exchange server has the Blackberry Enterprise Server, so it was a simple process to activate the phone against our server.
It took about 2 minutes for me to just say "WOW!". The phone immediately dowloaded my contacts, calendar, mail and tasks and updates to any of those are immediately synchronized between devices. Mail arrives on my Blackberry BEFORE it shows up in my Outlook inbox. None of these features will be available natively in Exchange until Exchange 2003 SP2 AND Windows Mobile 5 are both available.Navigation is an absolute breeze and there are no useless games or cameras to clutter things up.
Now, I can be away from my office for business or personal errands and still feel that I'm completely available and productive.
In short, there is a lot more to Blackberry than just e-mail and bigshot execs and the vast majority of it doesn't become obvious until after you have actually used it. If Blackberry is gone in the US, there is really nothing that can directly replace it until some time next year, and even then it will take an upgraded Exchange server and brand new Windows Mobile 5 phones to do so.