Email on the Black Berry

Mobile handheld devices for people to access their email "on the move" are
becoming increasingly popular in today's world of mobile communications. What is
Blackberry and how does it differ from other personal Digital Assistants (PDSs)?

In essence, the blackberry is a patented device from research in motion used all
over the world by people who whish to access their emails on the move. It can
also be used as a mobile phone, but many people who carry one tend to have a
separate mobile phone.

The Blackberry device itself carries a SIM card just like a mobile and gains
access to email using GPRS. Depending on the level of usage, some people say for
the GPRS on the basis of the amount of information that they download but in
most cases, black berry users, as a result of the sheer volume of emails they
download, have a fixed price unlimited data tariff that they pay each month. In
general the largest portion of the cost of the Blackberry is paying the fixed
price of the GPRS data connection each month.

There are two main kinds of Blackberry - what are known as Blackberry internet
devices and Blackberry Enterprise devices. The former work almost identically to
a typical PDA, where emails are down loaded onto the device and opened there but
anything sent and received in that device do not synchronize with the user's
main email account back at their PC

Blackberry Enterprise (BES) device are much more sophisticated, and, of course
more expensive to set up. They are used in conjunction with a Microsoft Exchange
Server and a Blackberry Enterprise Server and provide a fundamental benefit:
complete synchronization between the handheld device and the PC.

If an email is opened on the PC, within a few minutes it will show as opened on
the Blackberry, it will show up "Sent" items folder on the PC. If an email is
moved from inbox on one device to another folder, the same thing will happen to
the other device.

The benefit of Enterprise Blackberries is that everything is fully synchronized
and there is no need to go back and mark items as read back on your PC when they
have already been opened on the Blackberry, leading to enormous time savings.

The cost of the Blackberry Enterprise device as mentioned above is more
expensive as users will need to purchase and install Microsoft Exchange as well
as the Blackberry Enterprise Server software. However, for larger corporate and
those for whom effiency is paramount, this investment may yield significant
returns. It is also possible to run Blackberry Enterprise off a hosted Exchange
platform - in other words, one that offers many users the facility off one
central platform- and it seems likely that both Microsoft Exchange and
Blackberry Enterprise will be offered increasingly from central hosted platforms
rather than individual ones

In a nutshell, whether using Blackberry Internet or Enterprise devices, it seems
likely that many users today will wish to take advantage of this mobile
technology to improve the efficiency of their working patterns.