Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Wackberry e-mails well, but that's it

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2003 12:59:57 -0500

Wackberry e-mails well, but that's it
Source: Sunday Gazette - Mail - Charleston, W.Va.
Publication date: 2003-01-05
Arrival time: 2003-01-07

The new Blackberry 6710 wireless phone/organizer/Internet device offered by
AT&T Wireless is the sixth such "communicator" I've looked at in a year
and I can now say for sure that I don't like any of them.

There is an obvious and as-yet unsolved problem here: cramming so many
functions into such a tiny package requires too many design compromises.
There are communicators that work well as phones, but are awkward for
data tasks. Then there are communicators that make it easy to send text
messages or browse the Web, but are clumsy as phones.

What's more, most of these communicators cost more than buying a good
mobile phone and personal digital assistant separately.

AT&T's Blackberry 6710 (www.attws.com/blackberry) is no exception,
selling for $499 up front. On top of subscribing to a voice-calling plan at
$19.99 a month or more, users must fork over $34.99 or $44.99 a month for
data service. The higher rate provides unlimited data usage; the lower rate
provides 4 megabytes a month and charges about a penny per additional 2
kilobytes.

To be sure, the Blackberry 6710 does one thing very well: electronic mail.
That's no surprise, considering it is the latest iteration in the successful
Blackberry line of wireless e-mail devices developed by a Canadian
company named Research in Motion (www.rim.com and
www.blackberry.com).

The original pager-sized Blackberry, which became something of a high-tech
status symbol at the height of the dot-com era, does only e-mail, and the
design - thumb keyboard and small screen - was adequate for the task. But
the original Blackberry was sold almost exclusively to large corporations
and was difficult to use with individual e-mail accounts.

Then Research in Motion caught hybrid fever and introduced several models
combining wireless phone and e-mail service. Five of the six national
wireless carriers now offer at least one Blackberry model to their customers:
AT&T, Cingular, Nextel, T-Mobile and Verizon. Only Sprint PCS is holding
out.

The Blackberry 6710, introduced by AT&T in mid-November, is the first
model with a built-in speaker and microphone for making calls; previous
hybrid Blackberry models - including the nearly identical Blackberry 5810,
also offered by AT&T - required plugging in a headset before talking.

Resembling a regular wireless phone reflected in a funhouse mirror,
stretched wide with a long screen and short keyboard area, the 6710 weighs
only 5 ounces and measures just 4 3/4 inches wide by 3 inches high by 3/4
inch deep - light and thin enough to clip on a belt with the included
black-plastic holster.

The 2-inch-square monochrome screen is sharp and displays text that's
easy to read despite its small size. With a little practice, it's not hard to
peck out messages with two thumbs, although the keys are so close
together that I found myself regularly making errors.

The Blackberry 6710 will automatically fetch e-mail every few minutes from
any account using the nearly universal POP3 standard; just about the only
e-mail provider that doesn't use POP3 is America Online. Users control
which of their e-mail accounts are accessed through a password-protected
Web page.

Rotating a scroll wheel embedded in the Blackberry's right side, it's easy to
flip through an in-box full of e-mail messages with one hand. Replying takes
two hands, but it is also quick and easy.

Everything else is a pain.

To make a phone call, you have to maneuver to the Blackberry's "home"
screen, which displays icons for launching the various functions. Then you
have to scroll over to the phone icon and click the scroll wheel.

More scrolling and clicking is required to either pull up a number from the
internal address book or slowly pick out numbers on the keyboard. This is
much more awkward than using a regular wireless phone; for one thing, it's
almost impossible to make a call without looking down at the Blackberry the
entire time. With a regular phone, it's often possible to dial by touch once
you've become familiar with the layout.

The Web browser is another disappointment, supporting only the WAP
format used in mobile phones. This limits you to the few WAP sites on the
Web, most of which deliver nothing more than a few news headlines and
sports scores, and keeps you from viewing almost all non-WAP pages.

Instant messaging also flops. The Blackberry supports America Online's
Instant Messenger, also known as AIM, and Yahoo Instant Messenger. But
the interface is so confusing that I couldn't reliably view and respond to
messages from my buddies. What's more, the turnaround time was slow,
with messages taking seven seconds or more to go from the Blackberry to a
friend's computer.

The Blackberry 6710 comes with a cradle for charging and for connecting to
a Windows PC, along with software for synchronizing with common
organizer programs such as Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes. But,
again, there's too much scrolling and clicking required to find your phone
numbers, calendar items and to-do list once they've been copied into the
Blackberry.

AT&T and Research in Motion make all of this worse by supplying too many
instruction manuals and reference cards, a total of five, all of which are
poorly written and make it hard to grasp many of the nonintuitive steps
required to operate the Blackberry 6710 efficiently.

To be fair, AT&T is marketing the Blackberry 6710 primarily to business
users who are less likely to balk at the high cost and might have an
in-house technology manager to help explain how the device works. But the
6710 still falls short; anyone who needs this combination of features would
be better served with an e-mail-only Blackberry, a basic PDA and an
inexpensive wireless phone.

Contact Mike Langberg at [email-masked] or (408) 920-5084.

http://cnniw.yellowbrix.com/pages/cnniw/Story.nsp?story_id=35682584&ID=cnniw&scategory=Business+and+Finance&

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