First off, the background. Research in Motion (RIM) has of course had a fair bit of success selling its terminals, and its mail server backend technology to corporates, often through the mobile operator channel.
It has also developed a personal edition so that you, me or anyone else can enjoy the benefits of push email. But even thought it is clear leader in its field, it has still only just broken the million mark in terms of units shifted, which, whichever way you cut it, is not a mass market.
So, the solution, it seemed, was to licence the Blackberry client to other device manufacturers, ie, the Nokias, Motorolas, Samsungs to put it on their phones. Granted, these wouldn’t have the full QWERTY keyboard that made the Blackberry so popular for those either tired of thumb or tired of Graffiti. But it would put push email onto your phone and sync it with your own email account.
So far so good, but the word Mobile Europe has heard from at least two of Blackberry’s would-be competitors in mobile email is first, there has been precious little implementation of Blackberry Connect, second, what there has been hasnt worked very well and third, from one particular opponent, the reason it doesn’t work very well might be deliberate.
The clear implication is that Blackberry isn’t too concerned about giving people a great user experience on their mobile phone, because they are not averse to people deciding that a two device solution is best if you really want your emails to go with you.
Now, has been little indication of what these problems with Blackberry Connect have been, and of course it is a little hard to simultaneously claim that a, nobody is really developing Blackberry Connect and b, it doesn’t work anway.
Making the conclusion that it is in some way deliberate, to protect sales of Blackberry’s own device? Well, perhaps we would be wisest to refrain from comment, but instead let Blackberry take over. This is its official response.
“Through the BlackBerry Connect licensing programme, handset manufacturers can integrate BlackBerry services into their wireless devices (including the ability to connect to BlackBerry Enterprise Server or BlackBerry Web Client services). This enables handset manufacturers to offer the BlackBerry service that best meets the needs of their customers, while maintaining the existing functionality and user interface of their device. The BlackBerry Connect programme has already licensed BlackBerry software and services to a number of handset manufacturers, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Siemens, Samsung, Motorola and HTC, and carriers are beginning to offer these handsets with BlackBerry connectivity. In addition, RIM has partnered with leading operating system providers (i.e. Symbian OS, PalmOS, Microsoft Mobile Platform) to tightly integrate BlackBerry connectivity with these OSs.”
Although whether you are any the wiser after that is highly doubtful.