Sunday, August 4, 2013

How Blackberry has Alienated their Email Users

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Blackberry is betting on their BB10 operating system to bring their sagging line of phones into a state of relevance. In trying to appeal to a wider demographic and bring on more carriers to market their devices, their loyal customer base is feeling alienated.

The big problem with Blackberry 10 is the way it handles incoming and outgoing email messages. All prior versions of Blackberry phones sent data through the companies own data servers. If you sent out an email, instead of being sent through your carriers own servers, it went to Blackberries. This gave you lightning past pushed email, something nobody else was able to match. Since Blackberries own email servers are super secure, it was the device of choice in the business and government sectors. It provided a high level of encryption, and obviously this is important to people because of the entire NSA PRISM scandal. BB10 devices are anything but secure.

Blackberry 10 handles all data and email by sending it directly to your phone carrier. Instead of the trusted and quickest method of internally handling all data, you deal with your phone company. Since data is no longer being compressed and delivered, data roaming charges go up. We have heard from many travelers that their data roaming fees have increased over 600% compared to BB7. Slowness is now a huge issue, as time sensitive correspondence is depending on where you live and how your carrier handles data requests. This is the main reason why there is no longer Blackberry data packages are no longer being offered. Email basically on a Blackberry 10 device is handled the exact same way as every single other smartphone.

Blackberry still provides secure email, delivered very quickly on BB10. The drawback is that you have to spend thousands of dollars on licensing it for your corporate network. It requires very unique equipment and the installation on very specific software. It is certainly not applicable for your average small and medium business owner.

I feel that Blackberry has lost their way. In trying to appeal to a wider audience, old school users do not have the same experience they once did. I have had every single Blackberry phone since the original Pearl, and have been really loyal to the brand. After owning a Blackberry 10 phone and being severely let down by the way email is being handled, I bought an iPhone. Many other users have also vocally claimed that they too have switched brands after upgrading to a BB10 device. Now, i use my Torch 2 for email and my iPhone for everything else.

I think Blackberry realizes that many users are still using older legacy devices, because of the solid refinement of BB7. This is prompting them to release new hardware by the end of the year, with good hardware specs and the older operating system. It should deal with Blackberries own email servers and might appeal to people who rely on email more than other users.

How Blackberry has Alienated their Email Users is a post from: E-Reader News

eBook Review: Jet Lag by Ann Birstein

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Verdict: 5-Stars

Now and Then Reader, the long-form journalism and essay publisher, has a new release coming tomorrow from multi-published author and travel writer Ann Birstein. Everything about Birstein’s piece, “Jet Lag,” makes it tailor-made for this type of publication. It is a memoir and therefore obviously non-fiction, but more importantly, its subject matter is so heart-stoppingly real that having it go on any longer than the e-short format that Now and Then specializes in would have been too much.

Birstein chronicled a trip she took as part of a motley tour group to see some of the most profound and horrific sites in Europe. The purpose of the tour was to take the travelers through areas that not many tourists choose to see, such as the Auschwitz concentration camp and the hollowness of the empty Jewish ghetto of Warsaw. Even more profound for this particular work is Birstein’s details of her fellow travel companions, including one of whom who was a survivor of Auschwitz herself.

Good e-Reader had the chance to interview Birstein about both the travel and the experiencing of publishing digitally through a long-form journalism platform.

“It’s something very, very dear to my heart,” explained Birstein. “It has the shape of a travel piece, and I’ve done many of them, and it turned out to be less about the atrocities–which were so terrible–and more about the people who were killed. I had a feeling of such amazement for them. Between the shtetl and the Holocaust is a blank. We don’t know anything about these people. It was rather extraordinary.”

Titles like Birstein’s are more readily finding a home in front of readers, thanks to digital publishing and to the growth of interest in long-form journalism. Much like the recent Kindle Singles interview with President Obama, conducted by editor-in-chief David Blum and completing at only fifteen pages, Birstein’s e-short is perfect for key readers looking for complete works of non-fiction that don’t require longer length publication.

“This was a very difficult piece to place because it’s ninety-four pages long, which means that it is too long for magazines and too short for a regular book. I was just delighted when [Now and Then Reader] wanted to publish it because the 21st century had caught up with it.”

“Jet Lag” will be available on August 5th.

eBook Review: Jet Lag by Ann Birstein is a post from: E-Reader News

Kindle Sales: $40 off Kindle Fire HD, $60 off Kindle DX, 85% off Kindle eBooks

It’s getting close to that time of year when Amazon announces the release of new Kindles. That means it’s time for Amazon to start offering sales on some of the current generation Kindles to make room for the new models. If you don’t care to wait for the new Kindle Fire tablets, Amazon is running […]