BlackBerry Cool

While cruising the forums, I found a little interview with director of RIM’s Wi-Fi development, Kevin Oerton. The conversation was mostly broad strokes: why wait so long to bring Wi-Fi to BlackBerry, what technical difficulties there were, that kind of thing. Oerton geared the BlackBerry 8820 as primarily an enterprise device targeted at campus-based companies with large Wi-Fi coverage. Most notably, Oerton says that carriers’ acceptance of VoIP and Wi-Fi handoff has been the primary reason for RIM moving forward with the technology. It’s not a huge leap from there to say that had carriers been more open to it, we would have seen a Wi-Fi BlackBerry sooner. As Oerton also said elsewhere, Wi-Fi is a way of extending the carrier’s reach to areas previously inaccessible. Once again, it’s solidified that RIM serves the carrier.