Blackberry Technology

From a technology that enable top executives receive their email directly and in real time, it has become a nice little gadget for everyone. A nice little gadget...

This article will provide you with the high level overview of what is blackberry and how it works. Hopefully this will give insight of the technology.

Blackberry is a hand-held made by Research in Motion (RIM), a Canada based company founded in 1984. RIM itself is a manufacturer of wireless solutions.

What makes blackberry famous is it capabilities to get email directly. If your hand-held is set correctly you can receive email directly without touching a single button. It's like SMS but more complicated. This technology is commonly refers to push mail. There is another email technology which is more familiar to us, non-executive, :) called pull mail.

In pull mail schema there are two component: mail client (outlook, thunderbird, etc) and mail server (exchange, postfix, etc). The client periodically check the server of incoming mail. If there is new email the client will pull them from the server to its local directory. That's why it is called pull email. In a push mail technology, server will automatically push the incoming email to the client without waiting any request from the client. This methods enable email to be received directly and real time.

The ilustration of pull and push mail is as follows.
(on progress)


After ilustrating the basic of email system, I now will dig deeper on blackberry technology. For blackberry to work there are some important component to add to existing mail infrastructure. This component is varied and depends on what blackberry technology you use. There are two services that RIM offers: BES (Blackberry Enterprise Service) and BIS (Blackberry Internet Service).

BES (Blackberry Enterprise Service)

(to be continue...)