Blackberry Vs. Windows Mobile

[autopilot]

The MD of the company i contract for phoned me asking for some advice. He was thinking of buying a Blackberry.

He said the main feature he liked was the ability to remotely sync with outlook. I have never really looked into it, but can this be done with easily with a WM5 device?

Trying to be as unbiased as posible, what do people think are the main benifits of a Blackberry over WM5 devices, and visa versa?

Thanks, i could score some serious points here

[herulach]

i think you can do it with wifi, and you can certainly check the same mail account via gprs/3g then sync it up when you dock.

[UltraMagnus]

wifi syncing has been disabled in WM5 because of security issues, it can only be done over a VPN now.

AFAIK, blackberries have better battery life, while windows mobile devices tend to have better specificatons.

have you looked at the treo 650 though? it seems to offer the best of both worlds

[TheAnimus]

WM5 is a much more complex, and powerful OS.

as such its more expensive, more power requirements so shorter battery life.

however syncing with outlook is much much better if you have an exchange server with WM5. Not to mention you can read/edit word/excel/power point.

[CocoPops]

You can also read Word/Excel/Powerpoint/PDF with Blackberry as well

[TheAnimus]

Originally Posted by CocoPops

You can also read Word/Excel/Powerpoint/PDF with Blackberry as well

can they do it 'properly' last time i looked at them they couldn't really render things properly or handle most excel fucntions!

[CocoPops]

They can indeed now.

Something else to bear in mind, is the use of battery backed RAM in WM5 devices..... ie battery goes flat you loose all your data and have to resync. So unless you can religiously charge your device there is always that risk.

[Aaron]

I think everyone has got it pretty much spot on - Windows Mobile (epsecially Pocket PC edition) is a much more complex beast.

This means that it's more powerful and offers a greater range of software, but this comes at the price of useability and battery life. WM devices do sync very nicely with Outlook though.

The question to ask is whether your MD is technology savvy or not. The Blackberry is popular because it's easy for the average business person to use, whilst generally WM is favoured by power users and geeks.

Of course, you could always go for the third way.

[TheAnimus]

yeh the battery thing is important to remeber! However, its really quite difficult to loose everything. Also there is the miniSD in most devices which files are generally stored on.

a big reason for choosing WM5 over anything else if you want your own projects to be deployed. Its VERY easy to write things on WM5 in .net, that can do quite complex things. If you don't want that functionality. then KISS (keep it simple stupid!).

[UltraMagnus]

Originally Posted by CocoPops

They can indeed now.

Something else to bear in mind, is the use of battery backed RAM in WM5 devices..... ie battery goes flat you loose all your data and have to resync. So unless you can religiously charge your device there is always that risk.

nope, they got rid of that in windows mobile 5, flash all the way now baby!

for buisness use, i would still stick by my recomendation of the treo 650

[Zathras]

Originally Posted by CocoPops

They can indeed now.

Something else to bear in mind, is the use of battery backed RAM in WM5 devices..... ie battery goes flat you loose all your data and have to resync. So unless you can religiously charge your device there is always that risk.

I think you'll find that the vast majority of WM5 devices have persistent flash storage, so there's no problem with flat batteries.

http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/...14/438991.aspx

Also if you have exchange server 2003 with SP2 and you have a sufficiently up-to-date WM5 device, you can get direct push email without having to rely on SMS messages. There's no need for separate middleware such as the blackberry enterprise server.

Blackberry however is no doubt a more mature solution than WM5 and RIM's entire business model is based around providing reliable push email. WM devices are generally much more rounded as PDAs and phones and offer a lot wider range of applications and are easier to develop for. Having owned both, I wouldn't go back to a Blackberry from my MDA Vario but I don't mind the odd occasional soft reset and I do far more with my device than just use it for push email.

To sum up, I'd probably recommend Blackberry for your boss for the simplicity, reliability and proven effectiveness. Give it another six months to a year with Exchange 2003 SP2 and more mature WM5 devices and you'd see things turn around.

[Neo_VR]

Like whats already been said, the latest WM5 devices, with the "push" update + a correctly configured exchange 2003 email server is very nice as windows mobile can sync directly with the exchange server, either over wifi, 3g, gprs or whatever without ever needing to be docked.
ive also found that its much more stable with this latest update too.

Blackberry is good but needs a extra server to host the blackberry stuff, plus most the devices feel really cheap and nasty and lack the developer support base that Win mobile has.