iPhone + Exchange - what I wish my Blackberry was like.
By john on Jul 25, 2008 in Apple, Microsoft, featured
The company I work for gave me a Blacberry 8830 “World Phone” not long after I started here. I’d love to say I was thrilled, but I’d be lying. I don’t necessarily have anything against BlackBerry, I just don’t really like them all that much.
The problem I have is that while they gave me a Blackberry, they don’t have a Blackberry enterprise server, and thus no push email, or over-the-air sync of data from exchange. Why is this important? Simple: I get dozens, if not hundreds of emails a day. If I read them on my computer, my phone has no idea. Since I read from my computer ALL THE TIME, my phone annoyingly shows several hundred unread messages. To get rid of them? I have to delete them one at a time, or reset my phone. Removing the mail account they came in on leaves all of the messages.
Yes, you could call that “annoying”.
Yesterday I got so fed up with the Blackberry and decided to see how the iPhone (2g, 2.0 software) would fare paired up with Exchange and ActiveSync. Turns out it fares surprisingly well.
Hooking it up wasn’t a problem - I put in my user info and let it auto discover the details. Since we’re using the latest version of Exchange auto-discovery worked like a champ. Older Exchange versions don’t have this issue.
Once hooked up it was only a matter of a few seconds for the sync to start up and all of my data was pushed to the iPhone. I could see ALL of my mail (not just my inbox, as on my Blackberry), see my calendar and my contacts.
It pulls data from exchange, including the whole of the company directory - available in the contacts app.
It supports multiple (color coded) calendars as well, helping me keep home and work separate - but also seeing both at the same time.
OTA push works like you’d expect - emails, calendar and contacts are all synced as they should be.
Overall I’m fairly impressed - it works well and manages to look polished and highly usable - something my Blackberry just isn’t capable of pulling off.
Popularity: 87% [?]
I don’t think Blackberry’s are that popular over here… mind you, I might be wrong because my knowledge of the telecomms industry and what is cutting edge and so on is severely lacking!
Helpful update, mate
sayerbloke | Jul 25, 2008 | Reply
Sadly the Blackberry is king of the enterprise world around here. I’m not entirely sure why - it’s got a terrible interface (at least *I* think it’s terrible), unless you have a Blackberry Enterprise Server it’s mostly worthless as an enterprise ready phone and it’s just plain annoying - especially after having used an iPhone for a year.
Generally speaking the mobile phone market in the States is a travesty - the phones being pawned off on people are absolute rubbish, half of them promising features that are barely functional, and when they do function are poorly thought out and implemented. They are treated solely as vessels to shoehorn people into expensive contracts with the mobile phone carriers.
IMHO the only phone I’ve seen that DOESN’T fit that mold is the iPhone - it’s not perfect, don’t get me wrong, but it’s been the only phone I’ve not wanted to throw away 3 days after I got it.
I think it has a lot of potential in the enterprise - and certainly should have Blackberry (RIM) taking notice.
john | Jul 27, 2008 | Reply