I have been working hard to avoid Blackberries of all kinds having seen sales people (who if you ask anyone who works with technology, they will tell you that people in sales push for the worst solutions available almost all the time) fiddle with them for years.

• They never quite worked right.
• Their voice quality sucked.
• They’re a closed platform.
• The integrate with Exchange as some kind of parasitic add-on module (as if running a Windows mail server wasn’t enough of a threat exposure)

Clearly, theirs is like the ultimate recipe for suck.

So I avoided them. I would say things like “You have a business case for me to have mobile email? No problem. I’ll take care of it.” I would then have some kind of mail solution of my own that would work well, integrate with everything else I was doing, and not drive me insane.

Before I complain any more, I will give it up for one thing that Blackberry does do. They push a mobile security policy to their devices that can involve remotely wiping the handheld

They really can’t take credit for all of this as everyone else supports it as well, but it’s a good thing from a governance/management angle. It is obvious that they would need it first because of their sales-centric user base, but necessity is the mother of invention. It’s also the mother of horrible duct-tape-style nasty rigging of solutions.

After dorking around with one of these consumer-level Blackberries and noting how it would ring occasionally and just vibrate at other times. It would perform randomly when I expected things to work all of the time. Additionally, their touch-typing is primitive when compared to other phones. It did not please me.

Enough of this. Can I use my old Nokia e61? It has blackberry software. Shouldn’t it work?

Apparently not. I gave it a good try, but there would be some version incompatibility or hidden password (likely inserted by carriers) that would prevent me from using the software successfully.

This really isn’t surprising why this might be if you look at the Nokia BlackBerry Connect page and look at the completely different dependencies for each of the carriers. If you’ve upgraded your firmware, as I’ve mentioned before is always a good idea, then you can’t use BlackBerry software with it. If it’s supported at all. If you look at BlackBerry’s own site, you get a huge list of carrier sites where you might be able to download a specific supported out of date build.

So let us consider this a moment and ignore some of the exceptional cases. This, usually, is a service that pushes email from a service that a business owns to a handset that a business owns transported over a cellular network.

So why all the dependency and pitfalls for using software? Is it the case that cellular providers believe that handsets should never be touched by end users or even corporate customers and if you do, to fix a vulnerability for instance, they just shouldn’t work anymore.

Having to choose between functionality and security is not fair.

I suppose it makes some sense that they don’t want to support their software on other smartphones as they would prefer you purchased their handset platform as well, but what about supporting people who purchased their enterprise products? Is the message “Too bad, buy more of our stuff”?

Backward, trouble to manage, and poorly performing. I guess I’ll continue to be surprised that people continue to use them. It really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that Android and iPhone are going to dominate the market in the next couple of years.

It is a question of usability.

Does this industry really intend that users need to continue to decide between functionality and secure operation? Why isn’t this seen as completely ridiculous? There isn’t any value in requiring a middleman between enterprise software and the platform where the client software runs.