[Gllug] Blackberry

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Tue, 2005-03-01 at 10:32 +0000, Simon Morris wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-03-01 at 10:00 +0000, Richard Jones wrote:
> > I was playing with a Blackberry the other day, and was quite surprised
> > to find that there was no way to connect it to an arbitrary IMAP
> > service.
> > 
> > I guess it doesn't do IMAP, but requires some sort of proprietary mail
> > server?
> > 
> > Rich.
> 
> It requires a Blackberry Enterprise Server and uses a patented protocol
> to push mail out to the handset.

AFAIK, Blackberries come in two "sorts" these days. There's the full
enterprise setup, where the Blackberry connects across the internet to a
Blackberry Enterprise server. This is a box that runs expensive
Blackberry software, and basically pretends to be an Outlook client to
connect to your Exchange server (it can also work with Lotus Notes, I
believe). It then uses proprietary protocols to talk to the handset. The
second option is to connect it to a maildrop provided by your mobile
network operator, and forward mail for that user there. As far as I can
tell, this offers reduced functionality over the BES option.

I am in the process of looking at this sort of thing for a couple of
users, and will be getting the Treo 650 as soon as it appears. You can
get at least two decent SSL capable IMAP clients for PalmOS, and the
Treo is a much better general purpose PDA than the Blackberry. It's also
possible to sync palm devices with Mozilla. Calendar syncing is not
there yet, but is reportedly coming, and Sunbird/Moz calendar does
networked calendars via an ics file on a WebDAV share. Ironically this
works better on a Mac, where you can sync with Apple's iCal, and then
publish to a WebDAV server from that.

Sunbird is currently the weak point in the Mozilla suite, but if they
can get it to do device sync and decent networking (preferably with a
real calendar server), then it'll really be something. Palm devices are
well supported by pilot-link, and getting calendar data from the device
should be fairly straightforward - the new 0.12 version of pilot link
should build on Windows as well as *nix OS's, and provides good sample
conduits for datebook syncing.

Mike.

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