The Black Berry Offers Email on the Go

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.