Let’s start with full disclosure – I own a BlackBerry Curve. It provides me the freedom I require. I am not tied to the office. I can be out of the office and still receive my emails and determine if the email or document promised to be sent to me has indeed arrived. I can also get a quick note out and/or be responsive to a client’s email and simply state “Not in office. Call U later.” Instead of waiting to the end of this article for the “Moral of the Story”, let me state upfront in my opinion that the secret to high-tech (and especially wireless) should be to make the technology work for you and not the other way around. As of late, there has been a flurry of news surrounding 3G and RIM’s BlackBerry and so I am not quite sure that making the technology work for you instead of you being tied to the technology can remain as my mantra, but I will try. I do not intend for the following to sound like a commercial, but I confess that it might.
RIM announced its latest handheld device, the BlackBerry Bold. We can expect to see this new smartphone this summer. While the corporate customer is RIM’s target market for now, the added features to the BlackBerry Bold may help extend RIM’s reach into the consumer market as well. The new BlackBerry Bold will have “the most vivid display ever on a BlackBerry, a 2-megapixel camera with video recording capability and a media player for watching movies and managing music collections.” To be more descriptive, “the enhanced display” will be “twice the resolution of the Curve. The half-VGA color LCD is ‘fused’ to the undersurface of the device lens, which RIM says, improves definition and clarity.” Further the new BlackBerry Bold is “Sleek, shiny and sharp in design” and comes with “a newly designed full QWERTY keyboard, integrated GPS and 802.11 Wi-Fi. In addition, the unit has a 624MHz mobile processor for faster document downloading and support for triband HSDPA networks.” The more consumer-friendly features of this new device puts Apple’s iPhone squarely in its crosshairs. Read all about these new features in the article as reported by Reuters in the Internetnews.com post A Bold New BlackBerry for Business and also Judy Mottl’s article BlackBerry Goes Bold for Market Gold.
Continuing with this flurry of announcements, as I explained in my post of May 8, 2008, SAP Sapphire 2008, SAP will be integrating its CRM functionality into the BlackBerry with an aim at integrating all the functionality of the SAP software suite in the near future. This announcement was quickly followed by Microsoft announcing that it will make available Windows Live service on the RIM device as well. Users will now have available Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail. If this wasn’t enough, IBM announced that it is making the BlackBerry the only handheld enterprise device to have full mobile access to all Lotus collaboration solutions which includes Lotus Notes and Sametime. Users will now be able to collaborate across documents. “With the Lotus Collaboration Software suite, enterprises also gain access to IBM WebSphere Portal technology. The IBM dashboards software lets businesses build Web sites and single screen dashboard views that deliver information, applications and processes personalized to the individual BlackBerry user.” Judy Mottl reports this and more in her article IBM Lotus Goes Mobile Via The BlackBerry.
And if you aren’t out of breath yet from all these announcements, I’ve got one more. Mottl reports further that the BlackBerry will carry the RSA software in her article BlackBerry Becomes Security Token Device. With this new technology from RSA, the BlackBerry will be able to function much like a key fab security token. “The software generates a one-time passcode that users copy and paste to log in to corporate VPNs, enterprise wireless networks or network applications.” This technology will give greater security for network connectivity. As Mottl points out, such a need for this type of security for our mobile devices was magnified when several White House staffers’ Blackberries went missing during a recent visit from the President of Mexico.
That’s all I have for you now. But ask yourselves, with all this new functionality will we really be making the technology work for us or will we be working more because of the technology. At this point I am not certain.
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I recalled the ever popular “Tang” and then there was Velcro, digital watches, and the ubiquitous handheld calculators. To be fair most, if not all, of the modern conveniences we enjoy today and cannot live without began or in some way had their impetus in the space program. And so I read on. This one will truly be revolutionary.
The transmission of this massive amount of data, in almost real time, is due to a NASA custom designed and handmade 13 inch device called a Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier.
