Where next for Blackberry?

The Blackberry mobile email device has proved popular, mainly in North America where it has hundreds of satisfied corporate users, and increasingly in the UK, where BT Cellnet has been offering devices and server-side software to IT departments.

The idea is simple. Allow always-on connection to corporate email systems via a national wireless network. As more people spend time away from their desks - especially on the road or in meetings, away or in the office - the scourge of the workforce has become clearing dozens of emails that have queued up in unattended inboxes. The Blackberry, from Canada's Research in Motion (RIM), is one way to alleviate that problem.

One telecoms manager at a major US oil company told silicon.com that most executives in her office now swear by the device, even if they seem to be designed for the manually dextrous. Savings in time and money have been made. Good luck to them.

However, the elegance of the device - its simplicity - is also a problem. No killer application for devices carrying what we can stretch to call the mobile internet (including mobile email, in the Blackberry's case) has been found. For the mobile world in general, the nearest that has been found is something thousands of years old - voice. And that's the problem for a Blackberry and even networks that specialise in serving such devices.

In a recent research note entitled 'Wireless: Voices Carry', analysts the Meta Group highlighted the fragility of data-only US networks such as MobileStar, Metricom and the recently Chapter 11'ed Motient, carrier of data for IBM, UPS and even, yes, RIM. The future would seem to lie with converged 3G networks and stopgap technologies such as GPRS along the way.

Yet making a Blackberry, for example, voice-enabled isn't easy. All of a sudden issues such as battery life and weight become more difficult, even assuming users are happy with hands-free sets.

RIM is working with Motorola and the Motorola kit-based network Nextel in the US to become a voice player but plans in Europe aren't off the ground.

A solution might be a Bluetooth-enabled Blackberry linking to a Bluetooth-enabled headset, yet as another story today shows (http://www.silicon.com/a50752 ) this standard is no panacea to personal area network dilemmas.

A success like Blackberry shows the data plus voice world of the mobile internet has a long way to come yet.