re: Read "Losing the Signal", Rise & Fall of Blackberry. Good book.

940?

Yesterday I started the audio book since it's available on Scribd...it is definitely holding my attention which is hard to do w an audio book while driving. I'm digging it. Has even led me to go back to the old crackberry website/forum and see how things have changed in the last 5 years since last having a BB. Poor things... That BB Passport may be the single ugliest device I have ever seen. THe BB Classic is retro sexy..but really they are so far behind now in the game it just wouldn't be worth it for just a physical keyboard. I may look into getting the Typo2 for the iphone but need to research it more. Thanks again OP for the suggestion, been a great listen thus far.

I'm still baffled at the Palm Treo's lack of success. Starting with the 650, roughly the time that blackberry was taking off, it offered a very configurable mobile OS that worked with all kinds of mail clients without requiring any sort of proprietary Enterprise Server. It also added a touch screen, comparable keyboard (dare I say more navigable than the beloved wheel), removable storage, camera, and, best of all, a web App Store that would send links for the apps to your phone via text (some free. Some paid).


Does the book mention Palm at all?

quote:

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Treo ran on Windows Mobile OS

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The 650 and another model or two ran PalmOS. The 650 is what I think of (and I believe most people think of) as "the phone that made the treo famous." The 700, 750, Pro (850), Pixi all ran a Windows Mobile that was modded by Palm to have a unique feel. I owned the 750 and the Pro. I did not experience frequent freezing/crashing, and native MS Office support meant that I could open email attachments while the blackberry users in the office (no BES but we deployed ~10 or so BB) could merely receive an email that announced it had an attachment. We also had to set them up have their Novell Groupwise, followed by MS Exchange mail servers forward emails to the device's email address. It didn't have a configurable mall client in those days without a BES, unless my boss was just lazy and liked foolish workarounds. The windows/Palm mail client, on the other hand, was literally a mobile Outlook capable of exchange, pop, and IMAP connectivity, if I do remember correctly.
The Palm also had a Remote Desktop client. The Pro on definitely could even join workplace domains (not certain about the 750 and other prior models, as the didn't have 802.11 capabilities, unless I'm mistaken).



The brick break game on Blackberry most definitely kicked the arse of solitaire and the stupid colored bubble/circle games on the WinMobile Palms.


But even with a BES, blackberry always just felt like a more limited platform that didn't offer much more in terms of stability. Perhaps I was lucky in my Palm experience to have not had frequent freeze/crash cycles.

The downfall continues.