Research in Motion held a conference call today to go over the details on it’s new service: BES Express.
The call told the story about how the new service came to be and shared some insight as to who they think can benefit from it.
From the millions of new BIS subscribers yearly, many consumer BlackBerry users are naturally bringing their devices into the workplace. BES Express is a way in which small and medium-sized businesses can sync email and calendar events when getting a full BES license is not in the cards. This new flavor of BES bridges the gap between BIS and BES allowing these businesses to use their devices to their fullest.
Mobile user management solution BoxTone has announced that they will be supporting the newly announced BES Express.
“BoxTone applauds Research In Motion for its introduction of the exciting new BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express,” said Alan Snyder, CEO, BoxTone. “BoxTone supports all industry initiatives that help organizations both large and small mobilize their businesses faster.”
Boxtone helps efficiently mange, monitor, and support Smartphones of every variety for businesses large and small. Check out their software demo.
skySYNC is a system that allows you to access and cloud sync your iTunes music library from the web or from your BlackBerry. Until now, skySYNC has been running a closed beta and has just recently opened it up to the general public with the launch of their 1.0 release.
RIM have put up video demoing the WebKit browser that we’re expecting later this year and it looks really awesome so far. Mike Lazaridis was showing it off at MWC and it handles pages very smoothly. AJAX and JavaScripts run nicely in the browser and it scores a 100/100 on the ACID3 compliance test. The upcoming browser will support HTML 5, CSS3, DOM L3, Widgets and JIL Widgets. I can’t wait until this browser gets leaked so we can try it out for ourselves.
RIM launched the BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express today, a free service that lets users wirelessly and securely sync their BlackBerry with Microsoft Exchange or MS Windows Small Business Server. This new offering is targeted at SMBs that want a slightly watered down version of BES. The press release says it is also targeted to consumers, but I’m having a hard time understanding what consumers will be able to take advantage of this.
There are millions of new BIS customers using BlackBerrys but they don’t have servers to install any of this software. I’m not sure why RIM thinks this is going to benefit them. On the other hand, I do think this is a great announcement for SMBs that don’t have enough employees to merit a full BES purchase and still want the basic functionality.
Features include:
Wirelessly synchronize their email, calendar, contacts, notes and tasks.
Manage email folders and search email on the mail server remotely.
Book meetings and appointments, check availability and forward calendar attachments.
Set an out-of-office reply.
Edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files using Documents To Go.
Access files stored on the company network.
Use mobile applications to access business systems behind the firewall.
Lets hope RIM does something to address the purely consumer side with something like this.
Despite OS 5.0 being released over 3 months ago, 26.6% of 9530 users are still using OS 4.7. While OS 5.0 use has increased over time, the 73.4% that use it now are not that much more than the 61% that used it the first month after release. Most users either upgraded right away, but those that didn’t are unlikely to upgrade at all. Given the many improvements in OS 5.0 everyone should switch, but a surprisingly large number have not.
This data comes from the users who have download the popular free Pixelated game from BlackBerry App World in the given month. Pixelated does not report back at all, so statistics are taken via App World at the time of download. Statistics are from the 9530 model only in order to create some consistency across the data, especially given that almost all 9530 users are on the same network (Verizon). Pixelated had already been available for the Storm for a few months before November so these numbers are not skewed towards early adapters, but neither are the numbers skewed towards those that have little use for their phones, as this population has still gone and downloaded a third party application. Data from the beginning of the month and the end of the month were treated the same.
The above graphs were made from the data I collected, with the most relevant being the recent month of January.
