Blackberry : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

RIM (Research In Motion) is a fabulously profitable Canadian maker of Java-powered cell phone/PDAs that have colour screens and an alphanumeric keyboard. The big advantage is they let you surf the entire web, not just special WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) sites. Of course the screen is too small to display pages all at once which makes surfing painful.

They combine a hand-held programmable computer with a cell phone and an optional GPS (Global Positioning System) or camera. Some models speak both Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) and cellular (CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access), GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) or 3G) protocols.

Some BlackBerry PDAs/cell phones, such as the 8700 (312 Mhz Intel PXA901 Hermon processor, 16 MB SDRAM (Synchronous Dynamic RAM), 64 MB flash memory) support J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition), CLDC (Connected Limited Device Configuration) 1.1, MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile) 2.0. Last revised: 2004-08-09 Verified: 2008-01-09 Although Blackberry devices run applications that use only the standard MIDP API (Application Programming Interface)s (commonly referred to as Midlet (Mobile Information Device applet)s), developers can also use Blackberry’s proprietary JDE (Java Development Environment) API. You need Java version 1.5 or later to run the JDE simulator.

Blackberry uses its own code-signing scheme. Certificates are free.

The main reason for the success of the BlackBerry is the way RIM has offered tools for corporations to create custom applications. Further, the UI (User Interface)s are well polished. Cell phones in general are notorious for impossible-to-use command structures.

The phones come in a bewildering array of models. Some have 3G cell phone, Wi-Fi, GPS, a camera, Internet Access, Java, full keyboards, Blue Tooth, USB (Universal Serial Bus) …

The lower price models include the 7230, 7100, 7200. The midrange are the Pearl and the larger more-expensive full-keyboard Curve. The high end are the 8800 and the 9000 Bold. The newest model is the Storm, which has a touch screen instead of a keyboard.