Monday, July 04, 2005

No Berry for the Bee?

One purpose of blogging is to report interesting background chatter that would not normally make it into a real news publication (like the rumor of Lattelekom buying MicroLink that I blogged late last year :)).
This I just heard: someone offered to sell Blackberry e-mail/phone devices to what was then Bite GSM (now the Bite Group), but they apparently considered the idea too expensive and the market too small. The Blackberry is a PDA/e-mail platform that looks like a phone (more or less) and is a craze in some business user circles in the US and some European countries. In fact, there are help groups for Blackberry addicts and the like.
In any event, this was a strange piece of news, because GSM networks here in the Baltic do support e-mail plaforms such as the whatchamacallit from Palm, plus all the e-mail capable Nokia and Ericsson and other phones.
I haven't researched what it is about Blackberry that makes it more difficult to support, unless it is their Enterprise Server platform, which apparently is used to deliver applications over a VPN to the device.
Perhaps some reader could comment this. It would seem Bite (yes, it means bee in Latvian and Lithuanian) would want to support the Blackberry as part of its business services concept. Maybe the price wasn't right from this Blackeberry agent or whatever...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, this is very interesting. Can someone work in Latvia, use Blackberry to contact the server say in UK, but using the local services (LMT, Bite?) for data connection?

Juris Kaža said...

I';m afraid you have me on this one, but I can check. I've seen Blackberries here.