Vittorio Pasteris

Chris Ziegler su Engadget racconta la storia dei 10 anni di Blackberry

The year is 1999. Bill Clinton is the President of the United States, gas is 94 cents a gallon, Bondi Blue iMacs are a staple in dorm rooms across the country, and Microsoft is trying to bring the desktop Windows experience to the pocket, pushing its Palm-size PC concept (after Palm had quashed the original “Palm PC” branding) on a world still feeling jilted by the failures of the Apple Newton. 3Com subsidiary Palm and its heavyweight licensee Handspring have figured out something interesting about the still-nascent PDA market, though: people like simplicity. If an electronic organizer does what it says it’s going to do, keeps your information in sync with your PC, runs for forever and a day on a single set of batteries, and does it all with a minimum of fuss, people will buy. It’s an exciting, challenging, and rapidly-changing era in the mobile business.

This is the landscape Canadian start-up Research In Motion faced at the tail end of the millennium. It seemed clear that “staying connected on the road” was the Next Big Thing — email had finally started to become a standard in corporate communication, after all — but the roadblocks were many and formidable. “Always on” cellular technologies like GPRS and 1xRTT weren’t yet readily available, and circuit-switched data running over pervasive D-AMPS and CDMA networks was painfully slow and expensive — not to mention a death wish for battery life.

Manufacturers and service providers took a two-pronged approach to overcoming the limitations: one, keep data consumption modest; and two, bypass the traditional cellphone networks altogether. Two-way paging networks like ReFLEX didn’t have the bandwidth to handle the data demands of a late 1990s-era PDA with a big display, but DataTAC and Mobitex networks — running at a blistering 19.2Kbps and 8Kbps, respectively — were already widely deployed across North America. Neither technology had been conceived with consumer use in mind, but they were robust, proven, and most importantly, available.

Fon ha presentato Peek Fon, un device mobile interessante per la sua originalità che è la versione europea del Peek venduto negli USA.

Si tratta di un lettore mobile di email che ricorda il Blackberry, ma costa solo 99€ per sei mesi compreso il device e poi a seguire 12,90€ euro al mese. è un device GPRS che permette di gestire al mssimo due account di e-mail ovunque in Europa.

Fon dichiara addirittura da 4 a 5 giorni di durata della batteria.

Via The Atlantic

President Barack Obama is going to get his blackberry. On Monday, a government agency that the Obama administration — but that is probably the National Security Agency — added to a standard blackberry a super-encryption package…. and Obama WILL be able to use it … still for routine and personal messages. It’s not clear whether he yet has the device.

With few exceptions, government Blackberries aren’t designed for encryption that protects messages above the “SECRET” status, so it’s not clear whether Obama is getting something new and special. The exception: the Sectera Edge from General Dynamics, which allows for TOP SECRET voice conversations.

Perhaps the NSA and US telecommunications companies have created a special, more secure digital pathway for Obama’s messages to travel on, one that would resist the inevitable penetration attempts by foreign governments.

Via Mobilecrunch

With Apple and Google’s on-device application stores already peddling the wares and RIM’s BlackBerry Application Center just around the corner, Palm’s making an effort to not get left behind. This evening, Palm launched an official on-device application store for both Windows Mobile and Palm OS powered handsets.

With “App Store”, “Market”, and “Application Center” all spoken for, Palm’s going with “Software Store”. With that, the store name tap is just about all dried up.

Unlike the aforementioned others, Palm’s not toughing it alone. Palm has called on PocketGear, an app distributor which has rounded up around 50,000 smartphone applications since launching in June of 2008, to power the boutique. It’s a bit strange to see a handset manufacturer so openly sharing their application store’s spotlight with a third party, but it ensures that Palm’s got a full catalog on day one. At launch, over 1,500 developers have already submitted their virtual goods to the Software Store

Via IHT

For years, like legions of other professionals, Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign. “How about that?” Obama replied to a friend’s congratulatory e-mail message on the night of his victory.

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.
For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.

Obama has not sent a farewell dispatch from the personal e-mail account he uses — he has not changed his address in years — but friends say the frequency of correspondence has diminished. In recent days, though, he has been seen typing his thoughts on transition matters and other items on his BlackBerry, bypassing, at least temporarily, the bureaucracy that is quickly encircling him.

Via Google Mobile blog
As an engineer on the Gmail for mobile team, I use the Gmail client on my mobile phone all the time. Because of this, I’m always looking for ways to make it faster, more robust and easier to use. Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Gmail for mobile version 2.0 for J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones. Our focus for this version was to make the experience faster and more reliable. We rearchitected the entire client to push all the processing to the background, greatly improve the client-side caching scheme and optimize every bottleneck piece of code we came across.

Il Blackberry è un oggetto dal design e dall’ergonomia importante.

E allora facciamone uno a conchiglia … ovvvero uno strano ibrido

Bruno Ruffilli ha testato il nuovo Iphone

Ma come va il gadget più desiderato dell’anno? In una settimana di prova, l’iPhone 3G si è mostrato un apparecchio affidabile, con un ottimo audio sia per la musica (e i film) che per le telefonate. In più è perfettamente compatibile con l’ambiente aziendale (c’è anche il servizio Push Mail, come sul Blackberry) e permette di connettersi a internet ovunque, col migliore browser portatile oggi disponibile e il vantaggio della rete Hsdpa, in Italia già assai diffusa (e molto veloce, tanto da meritarsi il plauso dei tecnici di Cupertino). Peccato solo per la durata della batteria, decisamente inferiore alle 5 ore dichiarate da Apple quando il telefonino viene usato per quello che è davvero, ossia un minicomputer. I filmati su Youtube e la navigazione assistita tramite Google Maps, sono infatti operazioni complesse, che consumano parecchia energia, oltre a richiedere un cospicuo scambio di dati con l’operatore.

Un interessante e completo test comparativo tra il BlackBerry Bold e l’Iphone

Il video

Engadget e il New York Times parlano dei progetti di RIM di realizzare un Blackberry con touchscreen per combattere la supremazia dell’Iphone