“We want our Notes mail on Blackberry’s!!”
It was inevitable, and it has been demanded. I knew it would come, but I really had no idea why Blackberry is the only option in some people’s minds. There are so many incredible devices out there, that can do so much more, what is it with this device? Well, after a few days of research and pricing, I have started to see why it is such a popular enterprise solution.
First is device pricing. Devices like the iPAQ, and Treo have some incredible capabilities, and you will pay for them. Without the one-off rebates and specials, we would pay about $400USD for any of these devices. Whereas the original 7290 model BB is only $150USD. I keep hearing that I cannot work with attachments with a Blackberry, but it seems that most users of BB also have laptops and the BB is just a viewing tool anyway.
Then there is plan pricing. At least with Cingular, they wanted $80 per month for an unlimited data plan for the Notes mail solution that ran with the Smart Devices (treo/ipaq), but only $50 a month for unlimited data for a BB. No idea why, but that is one vendor.
Licensing costs favor the smart devices with licenses being free if we bought the unlimited data plan. BB gives you the first 20 licenses with the middleware server that you have to host on your network, but every license after that was $100USD. Both require the middleware solution to encrypt the messages and send them on, with the Smart Device server costing $1500USD.
All in all, the BB solution was about 25% cheaper than the Smart Device solution, with what appears to be very little difference in meaningful capabilities. Has anyone else had a different experience (or the same) ?
February 27th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
One thing you didn’t mention that was a real difference maker for me was the durability and stability of the platform. AFAIK, the Blackberry devices are the only ones that don’t rely on flash memory. This means that if the battery goes completely dead, nothing is lost. Try that with any of the other devices and you will be in for a rude awakening. And don’t bring up backing up to a SIM card or other removable media. Anything that the user has to remember to do is not something that I would call a robust solutions. Even better is the fact that with the 4.0 BES server, user’s setting will be backed up to the server on a regular basis in case you have to completely reset their device or move them to another device entirely. I think that the BB solution for the other devices might help with that, but I wouldn’t be completely sure.
Sean—
February 27th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Wow Sean, that’s crazy!! I did not know about the flash memory issue, but I did here some unofficial testimony that the BB’s were hardy devices. Thanks for the heads up!
March 1st, 2006 at 12:55 pm
Just for clarification Sean, flash memory is considered non-volatile and is used in the Blackberry’s. In fact, I could not find any recent models of Smartphone/Blackberry that did not use non-volatile flash memory at its core. There are a few newer BB models that use volatile SDRAM for temporary caching purposes.
March 13th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
I might have had the name of the memory wrong, but definitely know about the volatility of it. I do know our helpdesk spent a bunch of time reloading the systems of the PDAs that some of our muckity-mucks just had to have.
Sean—