How Much Work Can You Do on a BlackBerry?
Portable yet powerful, the laptop has become the machine of choice for the modern business user. But for anyone with extensive experience pushing the limits of its portability (in coach, on the bus, anywhere power outlets come at a premium), the lure of the laptop may be losing its luster - especially in light of recent advances in netbooks.
Wed, May 27, 2009
InfoWorld — Portable yet powerful, the laptop has become the machine of choice for the modern business user. But for anyone with extensive experience pushing the limits of its portability (in coach, on the bus, anywhere power outlets come at a premium), the lure of the laptop may be losing its luster - especially in light of recent advances in netbooks.
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And while the wise foresee ARM-based netbooks running some flavor of Linux as the long-term solution for business users' portable computing fix, the (arguably) foolish among us hunger for even smaller devices. After all, today’s smartphones look more and more like computers, with keyboards, browsers, storage, pointing devices, and even applications.
Not one to steer clear of a challenge or the chance to be labeled "crazy" by colleagues, I decided to spend a month seeing how far I could go toward replacing my laptop with one of the two more popular smartphones on the market, the BlackBerry 9000 (Bold) and the iPhone 3G. It seems as if everywhere I go people are constantly immersed in their BlackBerrys and iPhones. Surely, there’s more to them than e-mail and phone calls. I quickly learned the addiction of always-accessible e-mail, but even though the BlackBerry won’t replace my laptop any time soon, I can see the pocket-based revolution coming where a device like it will edge aside a laptop for much of my day. (As for my month-long experience on the iPhone, stay tuned for that tomorrow.)
[ Which mobile device is the best? InfoWorld pits the BlackBerry versus the iPhone in its mobile deathmatch. | Dive deep into the next-gen mobile devices in InfoWorld’s PDF special "mobile 2.0" report. ]
E-mail: BlackBerry’s key business benefit Research in Motion’s premier executive BlackBerry, the BlackBerry 9000 (Bold), offers a full QWERTY keyboard, midsize screen, built-in browser, the ability to run apps, and both 3G and Wi-Fi networking. In other words, there's enough on paper to entice you to ditch your laptop, but not enough in practice to keep you from regretting it.
If anything, the BlackBerry is designed primarily as a messaging device, and it’s amazing how addictive messaging on a BlackBerry can be. Too addicting, in fact -- over the course of the month, I had to develop a certain inner fortitude to consciously stop checking for messages and attend to other concerns, like my family.
