John Wargo

I was meeting with some executives of a half a billion dollar company last week and was struck by how Research In Motion’s reputation was being tarnished due to lack of understanding about the BlackBerry platform’s capabilities. The company employees carry BlackBerry devices and most of the company’s customers carry BlackBerry devices, but the company is creating an iPhone application. 

The CEO carries a BlackBerry but he also has an iPhone (for personal use I guess). During our conversation, he explained how he has a whole bunch of applications on his iPhone and uses them all the time. When I asked him if he had any applications on his BlackBerry, he responded by saying that he didn’t know he could have applications on his BlackBerry. Of course, being a BlackBerry guy, I immediately showed him how to install the BlackBerry App World application on his device and how to search for applications, download them and so on. He was ecstatic and apparently played with his BlackBerry all throughout the meeting that followed ours.

After that, I spent some time with the Director of Corporate Communications. As he described what he did and what he expected from us, he (carrying a BlackBerry mind you) explained how he understood that the iPhone really delivered a great user experience. He went on to describe how simple things he needed to do on his BlackBerry were ‘Hooooorrible!’  Of course, being a BlackBerry guy, I waited as long as I could before asking him what types of things he was doing that was causing him so much grief. He explained that when getting his Yahoo! email, performance is horrible and he constantly received a ‘retrieving data’ message on the bottom of the screen while waiting for the mail to load. Of course from hearing that I immediately knew that he was accessing his Yahoo! mail using the browser – and of course he was going to have a poor experience. 

I immediately explained to him how he could have one corporate and up to 10 personal email accounts delivering mail into his messaging application on his device. I explained how the browser would always be a horrible way to get his mail on a BlackBerry and that was why Research In Motion was so accommodating when it came to mail. I pointed him to www.att.com/blackberrystart and explained how he could configure his personal mail and interact with it in exactly the same way he worked with his corporate mail, though an application rather than a web browser. I pulled out my device and showed how I had a special Mail folder and listed each of my personal mail icons there.  I’m not sure he followed my advice, I sure hope so since it never makes sense to access your mail via the BlackBerry browser.

What’s sad though is how everyone assumes that the iPhone experience will be excellent and how certain that the BlackBerry experience is poor. In reality, in both of these cases it was the user’s lack of understanding of what they could do with the device that was tarnishing their experience. No matter what Apple does, the BlackBerry mail experience will always be superior. BlackBerry was built on mail and security and there’s no way anyone can catch up.

Google told me this morning that someone posted my AD114 slide decks from Lotusphere 2010 on a slide sharing web site: here. The presentation covers how to build rich client applications that talk to Lotus Domino databases. It's something I've been presenting on for several years now (at Lotusphere and the View conferences). What I've done is build a Domino Web Service then showed how to build BlackBerry and Windows Mobile clients that talk to the database. This year I added Android (for Lotusphere) and iPhone (for the View conference) versions of the application although I wasn't able to get the complete iPhone application working in time for the conference.

I've written about the web service and the BlackBerry application here - there's a series of 4 articles that cover it in detail. I'm in the process of writing up the Windows Mobile application (which I'll post here as soon as my back gets better) and I'll add Android soon as well.

I've been trying not to vent too much here anymore. I realized I was being pretty negative and vowed to publish articles that might really interest people. Unfortunately I can't pass on the opportunity to comment about the market's response to BlackBerry Device Software 6.0.

For BoxTone, Vox Mobile and all of those other companies that have hosted webinars on what happened at WES and for BlackBerry Cool and all of those other sites publishing news about BlackBerry - it's NOT called BlackBerry OS 6, it's BlackBerry Device Software 6. Just to make sure I didn’t miss Research In Motion changing what they called it, I confirmed with the ISV team last week that it’s called BlackBerry Device Software 6.

The BlackBerry Device Software is the suite of applications that provides the UI and applications the user interacts with on a BlackBerry device. The BlackBerry OS runs underneath the BlackBerry Device Software and provides the OS kernel and a suite of services (low-level routines) that are available to other applications. The BlackBerry Device Software is likely (although I haven’t confirmed this) written in Java and the BlackBerry OS would likely be written in the native machine language for the device (processor). The two work together, but they’re very different things.

First of all, the developer really can’t code to the OS, he or she codes to the BlackBerry Device Software and the Device Software interfaces with the OS at some lower level. When Research In Motion releases the Java development tools – they release them in conjunction with a BlackBerry Device Software release, not an OS release. It’s the libraries published through the BlackBerry Device Software that a developer uses to build an application.

If you take a look at the screen shot that follows, you’ll see that my BlackBerry Bold 9700 is running BlackBerry Device Software 5.0.0.405 (basically BlackBerry Device Software 5.0) and Platform 5.1.0.112. The platform then is the BlackBerry OS version.

If you look at this and think about what’s coming out in the next month or so, you should expect then that the above screen for a yet to be announced device would show v6.0.0.x (or something like that) for the BlackBerry Device Software and most likely a Platform of 5.2.x.x.x (which is the device OS).