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Mar 10, 08 - 04:54 pm Comment from: Jim - TIV

My Boss finally got rid of his Palm phones for himself, his sec, and his wife on the iphone update news the other day and bought 3 iphones. This is gonna be huge.

anybody who relies on microsoft "security" features deserves what they eventually get...

Mar 10, 08 - 05:01 pm Comment from: Jim - TIV

oh yeah, and ... first gasm and all that.

"anybody who relies on microsoft "security" features deserves what they eventually get..."

But isn't it great to have MDN trumpet the benefits of what is after all a Microsoft design.

And not to forget Windows Mobile users have enjoyed this for some years now. Good to see Apple catching up.

Mar 10, 08 - 05:07 pm Comment from: Spark

Yeah, I'm having a bout of cognitive dissonance with the idea of my iPhone improvements hinging on Microsoft products.

Mar 10, 08 - 05:10 pm Comment from: pr

Except that Windows Mobile sucks badly and the systems it runs on are all stuck in the 90's...Other than that...it's wondeful.

Mar 10, 08 - 05:12 pm Comment from: Jay-Z

@ Nice:

Apple is acquiescing by including this, nothing more. It is in no way an endorsement of Microsoft's solution. Without Exchange support, the corporate community would never look at iPhone. Much in the way iTunes for Windows was created to sell iPods to Windows users, this is being added to sell iPhones to corporate users.

And none of this changes Microsoft's well-deserved poor reputation on security (calling it poor is putting it lightly).

this is comedy, pure comedy.

what people don't realize is what RIM provides is actually guaranteed email delivery, not a ping then a sync ("active" sync).

imagine if you are in the middle of receiving an email with a large attachment and for some reason, your connection goes out. the server thinks you have synced but the phone hasn't, and it won't. RIM's system knows when this happens and delivers the remaining data. I personally like having that quality of service provider in the middle.

I hope Apple can make active sync work better than on WM devices as I have had a few of them and it stunk.

the outages issue is a joke as well. look at the long term track record of RIM and it still is 99.9% uptime. a few hours once or twice a year isn't a big deal. i know ATT has had problems with EDGE periodically, so at least compare apples to apples and don't believe for a second that iphone/activesync is bullet proof and will never ever go down.

let the flaming begin.

crazylegs is 100% correct on this.

Apple isn't so much about CATCHING UP... to anyone for anyone.

Apple simply INNOVATES with GREAT DETAIL in every choice they make SIMPLY to DIFFERENTIATE and to IMPROVE competition by use of the BEST at any given moment. Or, to use second BEST to what APPLES see as being the better choice in the LONGER TERM.

Understanding this opens up a truly different way of doing business. Which only today APPLE seems to succeed at.

...which is why all this drive for push email is complete BS and its "instant" nature a fake/illusion at best.

the RIM architecture was revealed as the hack it is by Phil's chalk board drawing. the so-called push only happens on the last leg..and there is nothing instant about it. and if active sync can't handled failed communication link per above, then that is another issue...

...give me IMAP with TLS and other hooks and let me control when I get go get email and pull it down...no synching required and I go get what I need.

How can CRAZYLEGS be right when he and many others have not yet experienced the option Apple is offering with ActiveSync running under ATT&T;and an iPhone.

He's assumption maybe accurate but not 100% correct.

Don't worry about iPhone's success hinging on M$'s exchange crap.

RIM's the target for now. M$ Exchange will get it's turn soon enough. In the mean time : Embrace and extinguish as usual.

Think of it this way (long term) : when most M$ exchange clients are apple devices (iPhones, iPods, Macs, AppleTVs?), who's gonna be calling the shots ?

Mar 10, 08 - 05:58 pm Comment from: ericdano

However, the iPhone is not limited only to Edge. It can run on WiFi as well, so, in theory, you have two routes to rely on....

With the iPhone/Exchange solution, reliability falls on the phone, the company's IT and the cell network. With Blackberry, you still have to rely on the above, with the addition of RIM and more middle services/devices.

May 2007,

"In a rare one-on-one interview with eWEEK, Research in Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie said that the event that shut down e-mail for BlackBerrys in the United States for hours last month was due to "a process thing," and that steps had been taken to ensure that it could never happen again."

I've seen that it could indeed happen again.

Let's see if I've got this straight: You think there will come a day when there are more iPhones and Macs connecting to Exchange servers than Windows and Windows Mobile devices?

Dude, step away from the computer. Not in this decade are more Apple devices than even Blackberries going to connect to Exchange.

RIM has millions and millions and millions of phones out there. To call RIM a kludge and not Active Sync is just ... weird.

RIM isn't evil. Why MDN insists on painting it as such is beyond my ability to comprehend.

I wonder if profiles could be created which would allow the contents of the iPhone to change depending upon the location that the user is at. An example would be this, at home games and 3rd party software that the user would use at home would be on the iPhone transferred when the are in the vicinity of their home network. Once they are at work, a different set of apps would be pushed over to the iPhone from his or her office computer's hard drive. Possibly a time based backup could be done automatically when the user is getting ready to leave the job. This would be like Time Machine for the iPhone. Also the ability to have access to one's files from home and from .mac would be very useful remotely on the iPhone such as movie, music streaming and access to documents that normally wouldn't be stored on the iPhone but may be useful from time to time from the home system while out and about.

Mar 10, 08 - 06:37 pm Comment from: Babakool

"showing the inherit design advantages of ActivSync vs RIM's design"

That should be "inherent".

Ol' Seth needz to drink him some more Brawndo™!

Mar 10, 08 - 06:42 pm Comment from: Predrag

Answer to the user who signed in as @Altos: (and it would be really great if people submitted comments using their name/handle in the 'Comment From' field, and put @someone in the body)

RIM is only evil to the extent of being the competitor to the, currently underdog, iPhone.

I disagree with your "not in this decade" comment. Apple is on a tear. IPhone is huge. Even before this, there were strong attempts to shoehorn it into the enterprise. Since Apple is riding this huge wave of iconic popularity, there is no question that before the year is out, Apple's numbers will outnumber RIMs. There isn't much RIM can do about that either.

I only hope that this is indeed another embrace and extinguish plan: Hook up with Exchange until iPhone is the dominant mobile solution, then start showing how much better OS X server (hopefully at that point including push email, contacts and calendars) is than the MS way.

The less people have to rely on microsoft products, the better for all involved.

activesync has been around for a few years, so it is well tested in the market, hence the knowledge about how it actually works. unless apple does something to improve the server side of things (which seem implausible), then it would probably work exactly how it currently does.

i do hope apple does improve this but i don't see how without improving the server, for which they have no control over.

another factor which is rarely talked about is the amount of bandwidth activesync consumes vs RIM's push. it's a large difference (maybe RIM needs 15-20% of the bandwidth active sync requires. the number may be off but the principle is correct). The end user may not care about this, although ATT might, until it impacts battery life, which it will. It will be interesting to see how this affects iPhone battery life.

Alright I get supporting ActiveSync to appeal to enterprise. But what of loyal Mac OS X server customers? Do we not rate getting these features working with our iPhones or does Apple want us to dump our Mac servers for MS Exchange servers?

Mar 11, 08 - 03:20 am Comment from: makemineamac

Crazylegs and others are right on the money all over the place here.. And Activesync will consume much more bandwidth if it operates the way it does currently. And the architecture and power required is far less than the Rim model.

I love Apple, and I'm sure that the iPhone may overtake Rim at some point, but I can't see that happening right away.

Activesync has been around since 1999 in varying iterations, and it works well sometimes but it does what crazylegs suggested, it pings the server, the more you ping, the more power you use. I do think it will be a good addition to the iPhone, but it's more of a bandaid solution for now.

As far as the comments in the article that Rim had developed their communication architecture long before Activesync, not too sure about that. Rim released their first device in 1998, and Blackberry Enterprise Server in 1999, so it's not that far off.

And for those of us that had the Handheld PC format devices when they were released, we not long after saw the first Rim devices and marveled at them - not at the way they looked - they were fugly, but they were way more connected than the devices we had. I was such an idiot then!

Once Rim started taking off, there was talk about a 'plan' for Rim to license their technology to Microsoft. That's right. The first device maker that was going to use this license from RIm I believe was HTC. But it never happened for whatever reason.

There really is an awful lot of FUD being created about this NOC as well. As others have mentioned, they have redundant systems, and I've only experienced one failure in 5 years. And as for delays in messages due to the NOC, I'm calling BS on that too. I can have a business counterpart send me a document while we're on the phone and get it a second or 2 later on the opposite side of the country. So is Activesync going to reduce the number of seconds to one? None? I'll just have to think about it and it will be there? I know we're living in an instant gratification world, but this is a little ridiculous.

My Blackberry has been rock solid, and was the very first device that offered all the features and benefits that it does, and it changed lives, governments, and the way business was/is conducted. You gotta give some credit where credit is due. It too was a game-changer.

The device also ruined lives in many ways because of the constant connectivity, including mine.

The iPhone is also an amazing device, also a big-time and better-looking and thought-out game-changer, and I have no doubt that it will eventually surpass Rim at some point. But that's not happening tomorrow. Or the next day I'm afraid.

</rant>

Just thinking out of the box for a second. Apple's inclusion of Activsync is a 2 part game plan. Since most of the enterprise companies are using MS exchange server; they're not going to change that anytime soon.
Part 1 is to get everyone all excited and get iPhones into the organzation. Once everyone's decided that iPhones are the only way to go, they'll introduce part 2 - that is they'll create Apple's own version of exchange server and make things even more invaluable to the users.
And you can guess what part 3 will be about.

@crazylegs and makemineamac:

thank you for your lucid comments...RIM is a fine company that has innovated and competed successfully against the powerful microsoft...their presence is healthy for the consumer and the market.

Mar 11, 08 - 06:51 am Comment from: Macromancer

"Yeah, I'm having a bout of cognitive dissonance with the idea of my iPhone improvements hinging on Microsoft products."

Maybe this will finally be the thing that gets your mind off the fact that your iPhone performance has been at the mercy of AT&T;'s crap EDGE network.