John M. Wargo

I noticed something interesting this morning while playing with my new BlackBerry Torch 9800. I was checking in for a flight home and thought I'd try the new boarding pass on the mobile device thing. I finished my check-in and had the airline send the boarding pass to my work email account. I opened the message and clicked on the link to bring up the mobile boarding pass. It's a web page and the page had some instructions for how to make it easy to load the page while at the airport. I didn't want to bookmark this page, but I did want to try to save it locally on my device. As I opened the BlackBerry menu, I noticed a new option called 'Add to Home Screen' (shown in the following figure). Of course, that's what I wanted to do, so I selected that option.

After it saved, I took a look at the device home screen (shown below) and noticed there was a little icon representing the page I'd saved (as CO Boarding Pass). The device even tried to make the icon look like the page it referred to. Pretty cool. It's a great feature and, once again, the BlackBerry can do the same things the iPhone can do (plus run any application in the background with great battery life).

I started BlackBerry Development Fundamentals December 1, 2008 and it was published November 9, 2009. Because my publsiher is involved with Safari Books Online, an early draft of my book went online there in June '09 so I felt comfortable saying my book was the 'first' BlackBerry Development book on the market.Craig Johnston published Professional BlackBerry in 2005, but although it was touted as a BlackBerry development book, there really wasn't much 'development' in it.

About the same time BlackBerry Development Fundamentals, my wife found a reference on the Internet for Anthony Rizk's Beginning BlackBerry Development and the race was on to see which book 'published' first. Anthony and I both launched our books at the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Jose in November of 2009 - He gave away a few copies of his book on the last day of the conference and my publisher had 75 copies on hand, setup a booth and had a book signing. It was a lot of fun.

I regularly monitored Amazon to see what other BlackBerry-related books were scheduled to be released and saw that Apress (the publisher of Anthony's book) had several titles in the works. Eventually Wrox got into the game and added their 'Professional Blackberry Java Development ' by David Williams to the book listing on amazon.com. Of course I've read all of the other BlackBerry development books - I've even written reviews of them for Doctor Dobb's Journal (if I can only get them published), so I had to order this one so I could see what I could learn. The book was supposed to be published in Feburary, but never did. Back in May, I received a notification from amazon that they were unable to acquire the book for me. Apparantly Wrox isn't getting back into the BlackBerry book market.

BlackBerry Development Fundamentals came out right before RIM finalized Widgets and some other technologies, but since I actually finished the book months before it was published, it was still too beta for me to include in the manuscript. I intended to go back and do an update around Widgets and App World and perhaps with RIM's announcement of BlackBerry Device Software 6.0 I will do some digging and update the book. We'll see.

If you hear of any new BlackBerry books, let me know. I like to read them to see what new things I can learn and ultimately I want to get back to updating my BlackBerry Books web site.  Right now I'm reviewing a new BlackBerry Enterprise Server book for Packt publishing.

Attended my first Telepresence meeting last week. I was meeting with a customer in a local office, but some participants were also in Chicago. We walked into this room with an oval conference table and three monitors sitting on the far half of the table. A few minutes later, people arrived in the room in Chicago, turned on the lights and started interacting with us. It was so interesting, being able to make eye contact with people you are working with across the country.

Of funny note though was what happened halfway through the meeting. The person 'across' from me wrote something down and passed it to the person next to him. They muted the phone and started laughing about something (without even looking at us). We could tell they weren't listening to us, but kept talking along and they soon rejoined the conversation. That very well could have happened in any conference call I attended, but with this technology we could easily tell they were doing it. I wonder, since they knew we were seeing them, why they even did it.

I was meeting with some executives of a half a billion dollar company last week and was struck by how Research In Motion’s reputation was being tarnished due to lack of understanding about the BlackBerry platform’s capabilities. The company employees carry BlackBerry devices and most of the company’s customers carry BlackBerry devices, but the company is creating an iPhone application. 

The CEO carries a BlackBerry but he also has an iPhone (for personal use I guess). During our conversation, he explained how he has a whole bunch of applications on his iPhone and uses them all the time. When I asked him if he had any applications on his BlackBerry, he responded by saying that he didn’t know he could have applications on his BlackBerry. Of course, being a BlackBerry guy, I immediately showed him how to install the BlackBerry App World application on his device and how to search for applications, download them and so on. He was ecstatic and apparently played with his BlackBerry all throughout the meeting that followed ours.

After that, I spent some time with the Director of Corporate Communications. As he described what he did and what he expected from us, he (carrying a BlackBerry mind you) explained how he understood that the iPhone really delivered a great user experience. He went on to describe how simple things he needed to do on his BlackBerry were ‘Hooooorrible!’  Of course, being a BlackBerry guy, I waited as long as I could before asking him what types of things he was doing that was causing him so much grief. He explained that when getting his Yahoo! email, performance is horrible and he constantly received a ‘retrieving data’ message on the bottom of the screen while waiting for the mail to load. Of course from hearing that I immediately knew that he was accessing his Yahoo! mail using the browser – and of course he was going to have a poor experience. 

I immediately explained to him how he could have one corporate and up to 10 personal email accounts delivering mail into his messaging application on his device. I explained how the browser would always be a horrible way to get his mail on a BlackBerry and that was why Research In Motion was so accommodating when it came to mail. I pointed him to www.att.com/blackberrystart and explained how he could configure his personal mail and interact with it in exactly the same way he worked with his corporate mail, though an application rather than a web browser. I pulled out my device and showed how I had a special Mail folder and listed each of my personal mail icons there.  I’m not sure he followed my advice, I sure hope so since it never makes sense to access your mail via the BlackBerry browser.

What’s sad though is how everyone assumes that the iPhone experience will be excellent and how certain that the BlackBerry experience is poor. In reality, in both of these cases it was the user’s lack of understanding of what they could do with the device that was tarnishing their experience. No matter what Apple does, the BlackBerry mail experience will always be superior. BlackBerry was built on mail and security and there’s no way anyone can catch up.