If BlackBerry Gets Smushed...

There are some good alternatives to the beloved e-mail service

What are
you going to do if you wake up one morning and discover that your indispensible
BlackBerry e-mail service has stopped, shut down by the judge hearing a patent
infringement case? While I still think this is unlikely, it could happen. The
good news is that there are some pretty decent alternatives for companies and
individuals.

Research In Motion
controls BlackBerry hardware, software, and the service that links them. Thanks
to this level of integration, BlackBerry devotees get an experience with few
glitches. But, like Apple Computer customers, they depend on one vendor-so
going with an alternative requires both a new service and new hardware.

If you or your company
decides to switch, there are a number of hardware approaches to choose from. The
most popular is the Palm Treo 650, with Cingular, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless,
sell for $200 and up with a service contract and after rebates. You can also
check out some keyboard-equipped Pocket PCs, including the Hewlett-Packard iPaq
hw6515 ($450 from Cingular Wireless), the Sprint PPC-6700 ($419), and the Samsung SCH-i730 ($600 from Verizon).

For corporations, the
major attraction of the BlackBerry hardware-service combo is the automatic
delivery of e-mail to handheld devices.

There are two ways to
get corporate mail into a BlackBerry handheld: a do-it-yourself version that
relays messages from Microsoft Outlook on your desktop and a back-end system
that uses BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) to exchange mail and corporate data
between BlackBerrys and your office computer systems.

The best alternative
for these corporate deployments is GoodLink from Good Technology. It provides
access similar to BlackBerry, but on a variety of devices, including Treos, an
assortment of Windows Mobile Pocket PCs and Smartphones, and the new Nokia E91.
Despite the similarity of the services, Good Technology does not face legal
problems as it has licensed the disputed technology from patent holder NTP.

A GoodLink or BES
installation can cost many thousands of dollars. Smaller businesses looking for
a simpler and less expensive solution might consider the Sproqit Workgroup
Edition from Sproqit Technologies, starting at $1,000 for five users. Sproqit is
relatively easy to install and manage and provides many of the same services as
Good or BlackBerry.

In addition to GoodLink
and Sproqit, just about every wireless carrier offers services that can push
e-mail, contacts, and calendar data from your desktop to Palms, Pocket PCs, and
Smartphones. For example, Sprint offers a personal version of its Business
Connection service for a $5 monthly surcharge on a data plan for a variety of
wireless devices.

Microsoft has an angle
on this as well, based on its corporate Exchange mail system. Soon, Exchange
will include automatic wireless synchronization of mail, contacts, and calendar.
The difficulty is that it requires the latest version of Exchange, which
relatively few customers run yet.

BlackBerry continues to be a wonderful way to get mobile
e-mail. But should worse come to worst, or if you are simply tired of having all
your eggs in one basket, it's good to know there are other choices.