Yet, with all that media noise it gets harder to objectively decide what features and functionality really matter the most before committing to a new smart-phone and the obligatory carrier contract. No question, the new Android phones and the Moto Droid are fantastic and give you just a glimpse of things to come, but the Blackberry Storm is in many ways an equal contender on a more mature platform. The launch of the original Storm last year was a bit of a flop – mainly because the software was just not ready for prime time and subsequent patches were slow to market. Here are 5 reasons why you should still look at the Storm when shopping for your next smart-phone.

RIM OS 5.0: What took RIM so long? The latest version of the Blackberry OS, just released in October, finally provides all the features it should have had when the Storm originally launched last fall, not to mention the many bugs that were fixed. The new OS puts the Storm back in the running and head-to-head against the other devices. Here are some of the feature highlights:

• Touch screen keyboard with 3 modes to choose from
• 3.2 MP camera with AF, LED flash and video recording
• Blackberry App-World (thousands of apps exist for the BB)
• Word completion and auto correct
• Notifications on message folders (email, sms, facebook, etc.)
• Multiple email account and address book sync
• Great SMS texting interface
• Media player (pictures, music, video)
• Volume control overlay on top of all apps
• Image resizing when sharing (email sms)
• Copy & paste

The Network: The coolest smart-phone is really only as good as the network, meaning – Most of the apps are no fun to use if you don’t have fast and reliable data coverage. AT&T’s 3G coverage or the lack thereof turns out to be one of the biggest source of user complaint with the iPhone. Verizon has a great 3G network and aggressively markets that difference in the “there is a map for that” commercials. Of course all Verizon smart-phones, especially the Droid, enjoy Verizon’s domestic 3G network, but you are out of luck if you travel overseas. Verizon uses CDMA while most of the world is running on GSM. The Blackberry Storm and the older Blackberry 8830 World Edition phones feature two built-in radios to support both CDMA and GSM. This is big, if you frequently travel abroad. The Storm seamlessly switches to a local GSM network as soon as you get off the plane and gets you access to your email and apps. International data usage costs extra (~$15/month), but you can enable/disable the feature as needed. Just call Verizon before your trip and allow a little extra time ahead of your first trip to get the necessary SIM card mailed to you.

Tethering: If you can’t live with your smart-phone alone but also need broadband speed connectivity for your laptop, tethering is a must. I love working online while taking the Acela train from Boston to NY. I just connect the Storm via USB cable to the laptop, which gives me broadband speed most of the ride and also charges the phone. One thing to remember though is that you’ll lose data connectivity when making calls. Of course you can accomplish the same with a 3G USB modem or MiFi device, but I like to keep the number of devices I need to bring along to a minimum.

Enterprise Integration: RIM basically invented mobile push email with seamless and secure enterprise integration. Most IT departments prefer the RIM BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) platform over other solutions because of its robustness and massively granular security control. If your company needs secure mobile email with tight remote administration, RIM is still pretty much the only game in town. BES natively supports MS-Exchange and Lotus Notes. Traditional POP, IMAP and Web email are also supported through RIM’s hosted email connector. You can setup up-to 10 accounts and configure individual mail filters.

Usability: I remember the first time I used a Blackberry, having used other WinMo, Symbian and Palm smart-phones before, the BB felt immediately right. Things just worked as one would intuitively expect, the same way you get into any car and know where to find the turn signal. In all fairness though, I was late to the Blackberry craze, which I’m sure had its teething problems too. With all their features and functionality, Blackberry’s are still intuitive and easy to use even for the technically challenged. The iPhones success is built on the same premise, amongst many other things, but this is not about the iPhone… The Droid is on the other side of the spectrum with maximum flexibility and geeky charm that can be overwhelming at times.

At the end there are many individual and subjective reasons for picking one smart-phone over another. Your corporate IT department may have strong opinions on this as well, if you plan on using your phone for work and/or your company pays your monthly cellphone bill. All the latest smart-phones are amazing feats of technology and personal preference maybe the deciding factor in choosing your next phone. But choose wisely, buyers remorse and an early switch can be costly…

UPDATE: There is one reason not to get the Storm – poor web experience. The Blackberry web browser is trailing  far behind compared to Droid or iPhone. The browsing experience is slow and rendering of non-mobile optimized pages is very inconsistent. Unfortunately, 3rd party browsers like Opera still don’t support the Storm.

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Cage Fighter – Bruce
(flickr)

IBM Lotus Vice President of Unified Communications and Collaboration, Bruce Morse called out Microsoft at the Enterprise 2.0 (E2) conference in San Francisco earlier this week. The Demo Gods weren’t with IBM that day.  After suffering through a very glitchy demo presumably caused by an overloaded conference network (hey, we’ve all been there), he declared:

“Trust me, this stuff works. We use it every day in business and we have a lot of customers who’ve deployed it,” he said. “But obviously we’re having a bit of difficulty I presume with the network today.”

“I’m here today to tell you I’m not afraid to get in the cage with Microsoft – in their closed cage,” said Morse. “And so, I’d like to issue a challenge today for Microsoft at VoiceCon in the spring, to put up or shut up. I’ll be willing to match up our capabilities against Microsoft and let the audience judge.”

In order to differentiate itself from Microsoft, IBM Lotus is enabling its customers to leverage their existing communication infrastructure by integrating with Lotus Notes and Sametime. It is great to see IBM taking the offensive and I can’t wait for VoiceCon 2010 to witness the public solution shootout – cage or no cage.

Microsoft, are you biting…?

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Cisco’s foray into email called Webex Email is a result of the integration of Postpath, a company Cisco acquired recently. The product supports the MAPI protocol, providing interoperability with Microsoft Outlook. This is a smart move by Cisco, allowing customers to swap out Exchange servers on the back-end, yet avoiding expensive client upgrades by keeping Outlook on the front-end. Webex Email is available immediately to customers in the U.S. and Canada with support for mailboxes of up to 25GB. No information on pricing yet.

On the social software front, Cisco’s new offering goes head-to-head with IBM’s Lotus Connections, which combines user profiles, social bookmarking, wiki’s and blogs in an attempt to bring web 2.0 technology into the enterprise. Further evidence that Cisco is following the web 2.0 playbook is Show and Share, a video sharing service, and Pulse a social media content search tool.

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The lure of  “free” made me check out Google Voice and its built-in transcription.

For comparison, I used a recent PA message from my daughter’s school that seems pretty typical in terms of voice quality. sample_voice_mail

Here are both transcriptions.

Google

Good afternoon, this is Doctor, Diane thing was just giving you an update on the Russell Street School Construction Project. Yes, I will be. You know further with water service interruption to the Russell Street School regular water service is going. All construction on the installation of fight. I’m calling to with has been put on hold and stop until we can hook up of certified water tanker to the existing water pipes for the school hydrant protection is currently available and the Board of Health, the fire department and the L. A. T. N, O, W D had approved this plan. Once again, there was about an hour and a half of interrupted water service today at the Russell Street School. We will be home for the interruption of service give his plan put in place today to provide continue water throughout the construction price your project. I apologize for any inconvenience and I thank you for your patience. Thank you. Goodbye.

PhoneTag

Good afternoon. This is (Dr. Diane Dimos?) giving you an update on the (Russel?) Streets School Construction Project. There will be no further water service interruption to the (Russel?) Streets School that (??) water service is on. All construction on the installation of pipes in condos has been put on hold and stop until we can hook up a certified water tanker to the existing water pipes for the school. Hydrant protection is currently available and the Board of Health, the Fire Departments and the LELWD have approved this plan. Once again, there was about an hour and a half of interrupting water service today at the (Russel?) Streets School. There will be no further interruption of service due to the plan put in place today to provide continued water throughout the construction project.

While neither one is perfect, the Google transcript reads like the stuff you get from their translation service. You get the gist of it, but it’s so horribly mangled in some places that the context gets lost. There is definitely much room for improvement and I’ll happily pay for PhoneTag to get the better transcription. Unfortunately, as with many things these days Google will improve their service over time and most likely displace the smaller vendor.

Update: Here’s a gallery of funny voice mail transcriptions.

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It seems that email is pronounced dead every time a new communication technology gets user traction. The last time around, IM and SMS were replacing email. Now Twitter and Facebook are taking over. Perhaps this is simply driven by our love-hate relationship with email and the fact that our inboxes have gotten so cluttered with useless and sometimes even harmful junk that we are all wishing for alternatives.

In reality, email is still evolving to better handle the vast amounts and types of information that it was never intended for. New social networking services, instant messaging, voice, video, presence, wikis, blogs, bookmarking, media sharing and micro blogging will eventually all come together and complement  each other, and email will definitely be part of the mix. Solutions such as Xobni or Baydin are leading the way to a more useful and better-integrated mailbox.

However, pulling all this new technology together will be a huge challenge. One of the biggest benefits of email is the fact that it is based on standards. The way clients and servers communicate and how messages are constructed and delivered is all well defined and vendor neutral.  Look at the mess with instant messaging. There are more than a dozen competing public IM networks out there (Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, Google, Skype, ICQ, etc.) and another set of private enterprise solutions (Lotus Sametime, Microsoft OCS, Cisco Jabber, etc.) all with no or limited inter-connectivity.  Now social networks are adding their own chat and messaging capabilities within their “walled gardens”.

For the end-user this means an ever increasing workload, to keep up with the flow of information while operating and maintaining a growing set of communication tools and platforms.

The old clunky inbox doesn’t look so bad now, does it?

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Many blogs and websites already covered the details about the handset, which sports a large touch screen and a slide-out keyboard and is manufactured by HTC.

While there is nothing truly revolutionary about the phone itself, the rumors about T-Mobile possibly offering free 3G data access with a two year calling plan could be “game-changing”, literally extending the notion of free email to the wireless world. It will be interesting to see if T-Mobile has indeed the guts to make this bold move.

There are no details yet on synchronization with corporate email systems or enterprise security and provisioning tools. However, given the free/open access and flexibility of Android, one can expect many 3rd party applications to become available within the next few months.

Update: Predictably, T-Mobile did not have the guts to offer a free data plan for the G1. The pricing announced at today’s press conference is comparable to the service plans offered by the other carriers.

Technorati Tags: g1, gphone, android, t-mobile, mobile email

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The new generation of knowledge workers now entering the workforce is already heavily reliant on UCC tools such as presence and IM, VoIP, and a whole arsenal of new social media services.

“Businesses that neglect to enable instant messaging and mobile collaboration will lose the talent to other, more technology savvy vendors who promote communication-enabled business processes.”

Elliot further points out that as companies invest in rich collaboration platforms from IBM Lotus and Microsoft there is a need to buy also the tools to manage and secure email and IM.

Technorati Tags: uc2, unified communication collaboration, sametime, ocs

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“New York attorneys ordered Hirsch to provide records of the content of the messages exchanged on TXTmob during the convention, as well as the identification of people who sent and received messages, the time the messages were sent for the duration of the event, and a list of people who used the service during the event.”

Hirsch is fighting to protect the privacy of the users of his service, but it is becoming clear that under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, text-messages and for that matter all other electronic communications are admissible in court.

This raises some serious privacy concerns and makes you want to think twice of twittering about your life’s every moment.

The even bigger question is how companies must and can comply with discovery requests that are as broadly defined as seen in this case. The archiving of email messages is already adding a huge expense to corporate IT budgets. In case of litigation, the cost of retrieval and e-discovery of this archived content is often even bigger.

Companies should certainly consider these issues when leveraging new collaborative technologies.

Technorati Tags: txtmob, twitter, text-messaging, tad hirsch

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Sure enough, there is a section called Text Blocking on the VerizonWireless customer portal. I assume that the cell carriers are just as motivated to control text-message spam, since they will have to deal with the undesired system load and resulting customer complaints.

The settings are straightforward. In my case, I simply disabled all messages that are sent as email or originate from the web. I figured it is OK. to receive messages from other cell phones, since the sender has to pay for the text-message as well.

I am sure the other cell carriers have similar tools in place. Perhaps now is a good time to check your text-message settings.

Technorati Tags: sms spam, text-message spam, cell phone spam

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Email spam is already a huge nuisance and a significant drain on worker productivity. Getting spammed on your cell phone adds yet another dimension, as text messages cost the receiver money, often charged by the message.

“It’s so annoying because I get charged every time I get one, said Ryan Williams, 27, of Falls Church, Va., who receives half a dozen spam messages on a daily basis. They ask him to download ring tones, visit questionable sites over his phone’s Internet connection or urge him to subscribe to horoscopes or sports-score updates.”

Just like regular email, spam is only the beginning. Watch out for smishing – the SMS equivalent of phishing.  Some e-commerce and online banking services have started offering text messaging services for consumer interaction. I am using a service offered by my credit card company, which sends a text-message alert to my cell phone when certain charges exceed a preset limit. The crooks are now using similar, authentic looking text-messages to request personal information, such as social security numbers and account pin numbers.

Just remember, your bank would never make such requests.

Technorati Tags: sms spam, text-message spam, cell phone spam

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