Research in Motion, the maker of Blackberry smartphones, was once again under fire due to Monday's service disruption, the second in a span of 10 months. The outage left customers without Blackberry service for several hours on Monday of this week. Coincidentally, RIM has now just announced its first "push" email server for the home. The new server, just unveiled at the Mobile World Congress, is currently only available in Europe is for personal users of the Blackberry email service. For those who choose to use the server in their homes, Blackberry outages will no longer be a concern - if the server goes down, they have no one but themselves to blame.
The new server, known as the "Unite Server," uses an always-on computer in the home as the conduit for RIM's push email service. Instead of connecting directly to RIM's master servers, a Blackbery smartphone will instead connect to the user's own computer. Running this service could improve access to mail for personal users, as the server will not be affected by any goings on in RIM's Blackberry service infrastructure. The Unite Servers will also function as a home media server by helping to manage music, photos, and videos that are transferred to the Blackberry.
The service begins its launch in Spain through subscribers to Telefonica's Blackberry service plans. Later this year, Unite Servers will be made available to Germany and others, though no word on when they will arrive in North America.
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
I don't see the point in PUSH email anymore. In the olden days before phones could access the internet this was great because BlackBerry could "do" email! Nowadays nearly all phones can access the internet and you can simply set your phone to check POP/IMAP mails every 5 mins - voila you basically have a BlackBerry! - with more and more unlimited data plans (e.g. iphone) becoming available, cost is also not an problem.
IMHO the whole debarkle with BlackBerry going down for a 24 hours the other day is just because of a huge proprietary/legacy issue.
Btw, if installing the Unite server is anything like getting BlackBerry to connect to your Exchange then this is certainly not something that the average 'home' user will be able to do.
Marcus
Posted by: Marcus | February 13, 2008 11:18 AMAgree with Marcus, not many people are going to know how to use this.
Posted by: hawaii | February 13, 2008 4:54 PMI think you're both missing the point of Push email. Push through Blackberry, IMAP IDLE, or Microsoft Direct Push is low bandwidth and low battery use. The system keeps an open connection with a heart beat to the server every few minutes. When new mail arrives, only the new messages are sent. If you check your mail every 5 minutes, you download ALL the messages in your mailbox every time, even if they are on your phone. This is the way POP and IMAP without IDLE support works. You'll run up a huge bandwidth bill if you aren't on an unlimited plan. Not to hug trees and sing KumBaYa, but you're also tieing up a lot of the available bandwidth on the cell site by running POP every 5 minutes.
And pulling down that amount of data will eat your battery like crazy. On my T-Mobile MDA I used to do POP every 15 minutes. I would have about 40% battery by the time I got home without any talking time on the phone. When I switched to Microsoft Direct Push, my battery is always above 90% by the time I get home.
Push Mail has its place, but you really have to delve into the technical details in order to see it.
Posted by: John Foster | February 13, 2008 6:14 PMWhy bother with all that BB stuff?
Google Apps Mail for BB
and Gmail for BB
Soooo much easier.
Posted by: Andres | February 14, 2008 9:14 AM