SoftCom Corporate Blog

This holiday season I’m not going to be coy about what I want. I want a PalmOne Treo 750v. It’s the latest Palm device out and like its predecessor, the PalmOne Treo 700, it runs on Windows Mobile 5.2 and not the Palm OS.

Why do I want one? Easy, I want the ultimate smart phone for personal use. I have a Blackberry for work but if I un-holster that bad-boy when I’m at a holiday gathering everyone knows I’m still at work.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Blackberry but this new Palm has some great consumer features – touch screen, High-Speed Data GPRS, speaker phone, camera, and a bunch of other ‘fun’ features. With the latest design they even dropped the antennae giving it a much sleeker look.

Running Windows Mobile 5.0+ means I can take advantage of ActiveSync, and in combination with an Exchange 2003 service with SP2 installed, get my email and other data pushed to my device as fast as the Blackberry. If you don’t believe me, sign up for our mail2web.com LIVE service (FREE) and try it out.

This begs the question - what is better, a Blackberry or a Pocket PC running Windows Mobile 5.0?

Obviously for a question of this magnitude I need to refer to Paris Hilton. Below is a shot of Paris with a Blackberry 8700. Of course she is famous for having a Side Kick phone, having it hacked and then having her nasty messages leaked on the Internet.

I would suspect the reason she moved over to the Blackberry is for security reasons. Blackberry certainly wins when it comes to security. Rumor is Madonna has one too.

But notice that Paris is never seen with her Blackberry in a holster. She’s always got it clutched in her hands, eagerly awaiting some very important, probably dirty message. But she’s missing a very unique feature of the Blackberry that makes it the choice of many businesses and fleets. The Blackberry behaves differently when holstered and uses alerts and receipts when messages are sent and received. I think this helps organizations armed with Blackberry’s stay better connected.

Me, I want to join the current trend in Europe, who average more than 1 mobile phone per person, and have one mobile for work and another for play.

John Carthy
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.
V.P. of Sales and Marketing