Monthly Archive for March, 2005

This is a response I posted on the ABA-LAWTECH listserv. Thought I would commit it to blog too… This is only my experience and I don’t claim it is representative of what your experience might be.

I have used Blackberry’s for a couple of years now and like them very much. I recently switched to a Treo 650 so I could test the device. Some of the users here have commented that Treos are “better” than Blackberrys (for whatever reason is important to whoever is saying it) so I decided I needed some empirical proof. My experience is below. Keep in mind that we do not use a dedicated server in-house for managing the PDA mail. Blackberry has the Blackberry Enterprise Server and Treo can be managed with something like JPMobile. We are just using the service offered by the service provider. We use Cingular for both devices.

Blackberry: IMO probably the best device currently on the market for handling email . Research in Motion (RIM) really pioneered the technology of getting email anywhere at any time on a handheld device. We use GroupWise and forward email through a gateway (strips away the forwarding header) to the Blackberry web client. The web client delivers the email to the device immediately upon receipt. The Blackberry web client is the work horse here. It is configurable for POP3 or you can (as we do) forward mail to it. Mail delivery from receipt in an in-box to delivery to the device is under 1 minute. The PDA functionality (calender, to-do and etc) isn’t as slick as the Palm or Windows CE based products. It is more than adequate for me but some point to this as a negative with the Blackberry devices. Attachments don’t work very well though.

Treo: Well, my experience with the Treo 650 has been poor so far. I am on my third device – the previous 2 devices were defective. The email service used with the Treo only allows for a POP3 configuration and only allows you to check your email a maximum of once each hour. This for me is a major inconvenience. If I am in an email conversation with someone the Treo requires me to manually check for my mail if I’m expecting a reply within the hour. This can be burdensome if the information has any sense of urgency at all – and we know all email in important. The PDA (Palm) functionality is very good. Attachments are very readable – although I’m not sure I want to read a long document on a small PDA screen. I still don’t seem to be getting all of the messages from my in-box and sometimes it seems messages are not retrieved for several hours until I manually retrieve them. I’m going to try to trade this in for a Blackberry – or pawn it off, um, i mean, offer it (yeah that’s it – offer it) to another user so I can get a Blackberry again.

Experience may very from carrier to carrier and person to person. My company has used Cingular and Nextel for the Blackbery service and only Cingular for the Treo service.

Update 3/30/2005: Our Cingular representative was kind enough to let me trade the Treo for a Blackberry. I’m happy again. The Treo had some nice PDA features but for me the Blackberry does everything I need.