Today I'm going to share some thoughts about my new (work-provided) phone, a Blackberr Curve 9370. But really I'm going to talk more about the whole Blackberry experience - I've used various models on and off for about 10 years now, and have run the Blackberry Enterprise Server for two of my jobs, including my current one.
The 9370 is pretty much the classic Blackberry - it's physically not that different from the 6230 I had about 10 years ago. This is both a good and a bad thing. Back then, the Blackberry user experience was way ahead of the competition. The thing is, the user experience hasn't changed much. There have been some marginal improvements - the UI is much faster, the browser is vastly improved and doesn't rely on routing all of your traffic through the BES. While I actually liked the side-mounted scroll wheel on the old models, I understand it's not particularly practical as a browser navigation tool and though I didn't think I'd like it at first, the touch pointer on the Curve is much better than the trackball on the Pearl (8130) that my new phone replaced..
But of course while the Blackberry has stayed pretty consistent over the years, the competition has improved dramatically. The most glaring example of this is in email, something you'd expect the Blackberry would have down pat at this point since it was the thing they used to completely own. But let me sing you a tale of email woe: (Note that we're running the most recent service pack of BES, connected to Exchange 2010.)
Yes, I know some of the arbitrary limits can be raised by the server admin, but only to some other arbitrary limit. RIM also blames Exchange for the deletion issue and talks about performance-based reasons for the other limits. Yet somehow every other smartphone manages to keep mailbox and phone in sync, and all without making you waste time, energy, and (until recently) a ton of licensing money running an additional server in order to allow your customers to access their email from mobile devices.
And the situation with IMAP accounts is even stranger. First off, you have to use this strange web-based app to configure them. And after that, deletes only work in one direction - deleting them from the phone deletes them from the server, but deleting them from the server doesn't delete them from the phone. (Or is it the other way around? I don't care anymore. Either way, it's like using a POP client all over again. Perhaps next time they can license Eudora from Qualcomm to upgrade the whole mail experience?)
And that's really the thing. Email really is supposed to be the killer app, the thing the Blackberry has down. And after all these years, it really doesn't. Some of the shortcomings were excusable ten years ago, but now they're just a company not fixing things because they don't think they need to.
It's too bad, too - nearly all of the UI slowness I experienced on my Pearl is fixed, even with the encryption turned on. The screen is clear, the keyboard is much better than typing on a touchscreen, and the browser is marginally usable even if some websites seem to decide to send you to their desktop page instead of their mobile one. I've also heard people claim that Blackberry Messenger, not email, is their killer app. The thing is, I've been the BES admin at two sites and at one point the BES I currently run had over 700 users on it. And I don't know a single person who uses BBM. If their “killer app” is text messaging that only lets you talk to other Blackberry users, they've got bigger problems than a few complaints about their second-rate email experience.
This turned into more of a rant than I expected it to - the thing is, the 9370 is actually a fairly nice device. It's just that the whole email software stack needs to join the 21st century - I don't know about BBM or consumer-side users, but I know for me and the enterprise users I support, email is the killer app, and Android, iPhone, and Microsoft are all well ahead of the Blackberry in the email user experience.
We've outgrown our development environment for vmware, but we've got some older gear we were getting ready to retire that we've instead decided to repurpose to build out the dev environment. Some of this gear was ours, and some of it came from another department whose server infrastructure we absorbed as a part of ongoing consolidation of campus services.
Long story short, I've inherited an EMC CX300 SAN and an HP Bladecenter with 9 blade servers. Both are decently configured and perfect for our dev/test environment. Unfortunately I don't know the usernames or passwords for either of them.
The HP is easy - plug in the serial cable to the hardware management card, follow the password reset procedure, and you're good.
The CX300, on the other hand, has a serial port on the back. Which you connect to using PPP - seriously, you configure your laptop for a dialup connection, plug in a null modem cable, then "dial in" and run a web browser. Really? What's wrong with a nice, simple command line on the serial console?
Once I get this done, I get to figure out if there's a way to reset the Brocade switches without losing the license info. (Or I can just hope all of the ports are configured as one big flat network and I can just leave them as they are. Here's hoping.)
This is a first entry just to make sure the script is working.