Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Blackberry fails to deliver satisfying combo device

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 02:18:50 -0500

Blackberry fails to deliver satisfying combo device

  By Mike Langberg
  Mercury News

  The new Blackberry 6710 wireless phone/organizer/Internet device offered by AT&T
Wireless is the sixth such
  ``communicator'' I've looked at this year and I can now say for sure that I don't like
any of them.

  There is an obvious and as-yet unsolved problem here: cramming so many functions into
such a tiny package requires
  too many design compromises. There are communicators that work well as phones, but are
awkward for data tasks.
  Then there are communicators that make it easy to send text messages or browse the Web,
but are clumsy as phones.

  What's more, most of these communicators cost more than buying a good mobile phone and
personal digital assistant
  (PDA) separately.

  AT&T's Blackberry 6710 (www.attws.com/blackberry) is no exception, selling for $499 up
front. On top of subscribing to
  a voice-calling plan at $19.99 a month or more, users must fork over $34.99 or $44.99 a
month for data service. The
  higher rate provides unlimited data usage; the lower rate provides four megabytes a
month and charges about a penny
  per additional two kilobytes.

  To be sure, the Blackberry 6710 does one thing very well: electronic mail. That's no
surprise, considering it is the latest
  iteration in the successful Blackberry line of wireless e-mail devices developed by a
Canadian company named Research
  in Motion (www.rim.com and www.blackberry.com).

  The original pager-sized Blackberry, which became something of a high-tech status symbol
at the height of the dot-com
  era, does only e-mail, and the design -- thumb keyboard and small screen -- was adequate
for the task. But the original
  Blackberry was sold almost exclusively to large corporations and was difficult to use
with individual e-mail accounts.

  Then Research in Motion caught hybrid fever and introduced several models combining
wireless phone and e-mail
  service. Five of the six national wireless carriers now offer at least one Blackberry
model to their customers: AT&T,
  Cingular, Nextel, T-Mobile and Verizon. Only Sprint PCS is holding out.

  The Blackberry 6710, introduced by AT&T in mid-November, is the first model with a
built-in speaker and microphone for
  making calls; previous hybrid Blackberry models -- including the nearly identical
Blackberry 5810, also offered by AT&T --
  required plugging in a headset before talking.

  Resembling a regular wireless phone reflected in a funhouse mirror, stretched wide with
a long screen and short
  keyboard area, the 6710 weighs only five ounces and measures just 4 3/4 inches wide by 3
inches high by 3/4 inches
  deep -- light and thin enough to clip on a belt with the included black-plastic holster.

  The 2-inch-square monochrome screen is sharp and displays text that's easy to read
despite its small size. With a little
  practice, it's not hard to peck out messages with two thumbs, although the keys are so
close together that I found
  myself regularly making errors.

  The Blackberry 6710 will automatically fetch e-mail every few minutes from any account
using the nearly universal POP3
  standard; just about the only e-mail provider that doesn't use POP3 is America Online.
Users control which of their
  e-mail accounts are accessed through a password-protected Web page.

  Rotating a scroll wheel embedded in the Blackberry's right side, it's easy to flip
through an in-box full of e-mail messages
  with one hand. Replying takes two hands, but it also is quick and easy.

  Everything else is a pain.

  To make a phone call, you have to maneuver to the Blackberry's ``home'' screen, which
displays icons for launching the
  various functions. Then you have to scroll over to the phone icon and click the scroll
wheel. More scrolling and clicking is
  required to either pull up a number from the internal address book or slowly pick out
numbers on the keyboard. This is
  much more awkward than using a regular wireless phone; for one thing, it's almost
impossible to make a call without
  looking down at the Blackberry the entire time. With a regular phone, it's often
possible to dial by touch once you've
  become familiar with the layout.

  The Web browser is another disappointment, supporting only the WAP format used in mobile
phones. This limits you to
  the few WAP sites on the Web, most of which deliver nothing more than a few news
headlines and sports scores, and
  keeps you from viewing almost all non-WAP pages.

  Instant messaging also flops. The Blackberry supports America Online's Instant
Messenger, also known as AIM, and
  Yahoo Instant Messenger. But the interface is so confusing that I couldn't reliably view
and respond to messages from
  my buddies. What's more, the turnaround time was slow, with messages taking seven
seconds or more to go from the
  Blackberry to a friend's computer.

  The Blackberry 6710 comes with a cradle for charging and for connecting to a Windows PC,
along with software for
  synchronizing with common organizer programs such as Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes.
But, again, there's too much
  scrolling and clicking required to find your phone numbers, calendar items and to-do
list once they've been copied into
  the Blackberry.

  AT&T and Research in Motion make all of this worse by supplying too many instruction
manuals and reference cards, a
  total of five, all of which are poorly written and make it hard to grasp many of the
non-intuitive steps required to
  operate the Blackberry 6710 efficiently.

  To be fair, AT&T is marketing the Blackberry 6710 primarily to business users who are
less likely to balk at the high cost
  and might have an in-house technology manager to help explain how the device works. But
the 6710 still falls short;
  anyone who needs this combination of features would be better served with an e-mail-only
Blackberry, a basic PDA and
  an inexpensive wireless phone.

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/business/technology/4774271.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

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