Almost enough to make me an economic nationalist
So, some jerk stole my iPad yesterday.
It’s not terrible news — this was an old first-generation iPad that I was thinking of replacing anyway.
And this gave me an excuse to buy a 32 GB Playbook. And I discovered that it’s really a beautiful piece of hardware.
It was doomed, unfortunately, by its slim pickings for applications and its incomplete operating system — really, who ships a tablet with no e-mail or calendar apps?! But this will change with the release of Playbook O/S 2.0, the new operating system that will allow Android applications to be ported over to the Playbook.
It’s just the right size — smaller than the iPad — and has better speakers. It’s much better as a multimedia device.
And so I begin to see why the legions out there remain loyal to RIM’s products, even in the company’s tough times.
But wow, beautiful engineering, terrible marketing — that’s how I was able to get a 32 GB tablet for $250. Which is, I believe, very close to what it cost to make the device.
Let’s hope they can rebound. I shall give the BlackBerry London a close look when it comes out in the fall, for my next phone.
Update: Now running the developers’ beta version of 2.0. It’s neat.
And so I have Kindle again…
Sorry to hear about the Ipad! They seem to be the new favorite of the petty thieves.
RIM is a fascinating business and technology story. All the cell phone operating systems out when the Iphone came out have been abandoned. PalmOS, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and now BBos. All needed massive changes, so massive that they all got dumped in favor of starting from scratch. BBos is the last one to be replaced. Nonetheless, they seem to have a decent shot at making it work for them. IMO, the cell phone carriers are secret allies for both BB and Windows phone against Apple and Google. They want lots of handset competition because they all saw how Apple had AT&T over a barrel and don’t ever want that to happen to them.
Work issued me a Bold. It really is the best for email.* Sending a detailed message on my Droid RAZR or the wife’s Iphone would be much more painful. The battery lasts probably 3x as long too. But web, apps, maps, etc. need a lot of improvement.
*But why does it receive emails faster than Outlook, but take half an hour to notice that I read it on my desktop already? That blinking just gets annoying!
Depending on whether you are using a BES or BIS back end, the reconciliation of read messages can take some time to occur. With BES it’s normally a matter of seconds, with BIS it can take much longer. Mainly because wireless reconciliation happens only between the BB device and the mail server; propagating read marks back to the mail client [Outlook] depends on how often Outlook polls the mail server.
In a BES scenario, by default the wireless reconcile is a low-priority task; if your BES admin doesn’t manually adjust this then 10 minute (or greater) delays are not unusual. Your BES admin could probably get better reconciliation mileage out of adjusting the size of the message state database (assuming that the server’s RAM can handle it).
Interesting, I assume they’re running BES though I don’t actually know. I do think that RIM should try to fix it though. It is a very common complaint among people I know, especially ones with a work phone and a personal phone. They see it sync almost instantaneously on Android, and almost as fast on IOS and doubt RIM’s claim to superior email handling.
BBos has been a dead letter ever since Oracle declined to extend RIM’s preferential Java licensing (originally negotiated with Sun). Now RIM is convinced (along with every other mobile OS vendor) that some flavour of *Nix is the answer.
The Java that drives current iterations under the hood was superlative for working with a BES back-end and handling email throughput. It’s good (but not as clean and flexible as *Nix) when you ask it to do the workload of a modern smartphone, handling piles of rich web content and multitasking while keeping the UI response smooth.
I have a little nostalgia for the BB, having owned 4 of them and supported the infrastructure for ages. The thing that was a real PITA was the varying form factors, display resolutions, interface methods and app compatibility between them. Trying to find software that would function across all deployed devices was a nightmare. Sometimes you would find nice vendors who would offer you free software upgrade—and sometimes you’d be screwed and have to pony up for an upgrade, brand new license, or replace a line of devices because they couldn’t support the app. (Imagine having to buy a new version of Excel [or in the worst case, a brand new computer] any time your monitor or video card changed, because developers at that time were slow to package versions compatible with screen resolutions and processor power of all five extant BB product lines—7×00, Pearl, Curve, Bold and Torch. In a company of thousands, not everyone carries the exact same device).
Very often the easiest solution was to roll your own web interface and basically do away with the prettiness so that all device classes could get the same basic functionality. The situation has improved since RIM developed their own App World ecosystem, and developers are more mindful of the multiplicity of devices out there, but just thinking about how it used to be gives me a headache.