Opinon: Blackberry Colt

I just read an article on Electricpig concerning a rumored future blackberry device that's supposedly going to run QNX - the same OS that the PlayBook runs on. The article discusses the 5 things the author thinks it needs to succeed, While it's a well written article, I must take issue with some of the points made:

1. BES - When I used to work within Microsoft, I used to regularly have to produce material on how Exchange ActiveSync was more effective than BES as it was native to Exchange Server whereas BES is an additional layer of middleware (with additional TCO). I agree that for existing BES users, this may stop them migrating to the new device but for new enterprise customers it will save them a fortune in licensing costs alone.
2. Flash - I totally agree that Flash is pretty much a given these days but I don't think it's a requirement for competing with iPhone 4 which doesn't support Flash at all. Most of my web browsing takes place on my iPhone 4 and to be honest, I've never encountered a website where I thought "*!%@$ If I only I had Flash!". To compete with iPhone 4, it's all about the User Experience (UX) - Lot's of devices of various flavours (Android, Symbian, WP7 Mango etc) stand head and shoulders above the iDevice in terms of features but I wouldn't change and will likely get an iPhone 5 because I love the UX.

The other three points he makes are bang on :)

Outlook 2010 Best Practices

OK we seem to be on a bit of a roll with Windows stuff today so I thought I'd share a link to Outlook 2010 Best Practices from Microsoft. This is actually a very well thought out article and over the many years I've been working with Exchange servers, I've seen many a user mailbox that could have done with some of this advice.

A lot of the steps are Outlook specific but some of the general principles apply to all e-mail services.

Push GMail for the iPhone - Finally!

It took long enough but you can finally get push GMail on the iPhone.

Full details on how to set it up at http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740&topic=14252

Yay!

If you want to email me once you've set it up, you can get my address from http://scr.im/mindspace