When Blackberry first came out mobile data was in it’s early days. Download speeds were typically 7-14kb and attempting to read email “the normal way” was difficult enough – without having to download attachments etc..

Blackberry changed all that with push email and it’s unique content delivery method. It read the email for you, simplified it, and presented it to you as you read it in a low bandwidth format. It also opened attachments remotely and served those in a similar fashion.

It was revolutionary. You could read new email practically instantly.

Fast forward to today and the unique selling point of Blackberry no longer has the impact that it originally did. Mobile devices are capable of download speeds comparable to and even better than broadband, and they are going to get faster still. They all have plenty of working memory and are capable of viewing, and in some cases editing, most attachment types.

Given an appropriate mail delivery system – IMAP with IDLE support for example – and every device has push email. What are the advantages of Blackberry now ?

It has security and remote device management features if you are running your own Enterprise server but it seems that even RIM themselves saw that as something a lot of users just didn’t need when they released BES Express.

So if there’s not a lot of reasons to stay with Blackberry – what are the reasons to leave ?

For one you have to pay a monthly fee for the pleasure of using the service. Today this just doesn’t fit.

However, the biggest reason is possibly that RIM are a single point of failure. Email delivery is a peer to peer protocol. Domain hosts all talk to each other, there is no single point of failure. If you then push your email onwards via RIM suddenly there is so much riding on a single service, and when that service fails it fails for 7 million users. Getting it back online is a major headache and clearly backlogs could take weeks.

Today my preferred solution for the complete mobile email and calendar experience is an iOS device, talking IMAP to Dovecot and talking iCal to Davical. It just plain works. IMAP on Android is equally excellent but at the moment Android doesn’t support iCal natively – hopefully this will come.

Dovecot gives you full IMAP support – including ACLs (shared mail boxes/folders etc..)
Davical is a feature full iCal server, supporting shared containers, free/busy etc..