A guide to handheld operating systems
Published: 10 Aug 2006
BlackBerry
Although things looked a bit shaky for a while, BlackBerry manufacturer Research in Motion finally settled its longstanding dispute with NTP earlier this year and shipped new versions of its Enterprise Server software recently and, more importantly, software development kits (SDKs). And if we learned anything from the company's legal mess, it was how much people rely on these devices to stay in touch.
Ease of use
The darling of the corporate world (and many areas of government) wouldn't be so universally adored if it were complicated. Although an interface driven entirely by a thumb wheel might seem awkward and slow, users invariably find it easy to learn and quick to operate. The lack of a stylus and a touch screen -- staples of other handhelds – does slow down certain operations (such as hitting a link in a Web page), but the beloved built-in keyboard accelerates others, such as composing email. Ultimately, the BlackBerry interface may not be the most efficient, but it's certainly one of the easiest to use.
Core applications
The BlackBerry OS does a better job of managing your contacts than managing your calendar. The Address Book applet offers all the amenities you'd expect, plus contact grouping and unsurpassed integration with the phone and messaging programs. To send someone an email message, for instance, you simply highlight the person's name, press the click wheel and then select E-mail Joe Smith. There's no need to open the contact's record and navigate extra menus.
The calendar on BlackBerrys is a bit unwieldy by comparison, perhaps due to the awkward process for navigating between different days and views. The Week view is particularly cumbersome, requiring serious 'wheeling' to move the cursor from one day to the next. The Calendar applet itself is sufficiently capable, but suffers under the weight of the wheel-based interface.
RIM also supplies the obligatory memo pad and to-do list, along with an alarm clock, a calculator, a photo viewer and a password manager -- all functional but rudimentary applets.
Desktop compatibility
Like a traditional handheld, a BlackBerry can synchronise with your PC, swapping data with Outlook or Lotus Notes; the bundled Intellisync utility makes this possible. Of course, the BlackBerry OS also affords robust wireless synchronisation, allowing new appointments, contacts, memos and tasks to be 'pushed' from your office to your handheld (and back again), just like email. That gives BlackBerrys a fairly major advantage over handhelds that rely on more traditional synchronisation methods.
Office compatibility
Although the BlackBerry OS supports the 'big three' Office applications -- Word, Excel and PowerPoint -- it limits you to viewing documents only. You can't compose new ones or do any editing, which is surprising given the presence of a perfectly good thumb keyboard. As for PDFs, the OS can open them as well, but it strips most graphics and formatting in the process, leaving you with little more than text.
Email
Ever wonder about the origin of the 'CrackBerry' nickname? In a word: email. It's what the devices were designed to do, so it should come as no surprise that they excel at it. Ironically, it's not the email applet itself that's so addictive (although it deserves praise for its streamlined efficiency), but rather the 'push' method of email delivery. Instead of having to be retrieved manually, new messages just appear like magic on the device. Although Palm and Microsoft have now engineered similar systems for their smartphones, BlackBerry remains the undisputed email champion.
Multimedia
Fully aware of the BlackBerry's reputation as a serious business tool, RIM has limited multimedia features on its devices. Although the latest models can play MP3s as ringtones, there's no media player to speak of -- nor is there enough memory to hold more than a few tunes anyway. The same is true for videos, while the lack of a memory card slot means that even with third-party software, you'd be limited to very short clips. At least the OS includes a photo viewer, although you'll get a lot more mileage from one of the available third-party programs. Also, RIM has recently said that it plans to add multimedia features, such as music, video and photography, to its future devices.
Third-party applications
Software developers haven't given BlackBerrys the same attention that users have. We found only a few hundred third-party applications -- a drop in the ocean compared with the thousands available for the Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile platforms. The essentials are there -- a password manager, a Sudoku game, the popular RepliGo document viewer and more -- and RIM promises plenty more to come thanks to new SDKs released in late 2005. But for now, the software pickings remain relatively slim.
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