Our friends over at MIBlackBerry.com told us to check out the Globe and Mail piece by Mike Hartley about Wireless transfers to your BlackBerry from your desktop. BlackBerry Home Server, as RIM has dubbed it, is the coolest non-device BlackBerry news that we’ve heard of in a while.
BlackBerry Home Server will be software component that BlackBerry users install on their PC or laptop that would have access to RIM’s backend servers. Drop file on your computer, upload it to RIM’s NOC, and then your files are wirelessly transferred to your BlackBerry.
The BlackBerry Home Server client also allows you to manage your digital media like you can in iTunes. How cool would an iTunes-like BlackBerry Media Manager be that wirelessly synchs your media to your BlackBerry?
It doesn’t look like Research in Motion is going to lay down in front of Apple in the consumer market any time soon.
That’s great and all, but I sure wish they would make the simple notion of communicating with your computer easier when it comes to your files and media. When I plug the thing in USB or connect Bluetooth, I want it to mount as a drive and transfer/remove as I please. Should I need to sync stuff, then yeah, I’ll use the sync software. But as it stands, especially on a mac, transferring files to and fro is cumbersome and all but unusable.
Even better, let me run this server software on my home computer so I don’t have to worry about what I send up to the RIM server.
This is all elementary concepts yet the providers and RIM feel the need to make it difficult for reasons I don’t get. Oh, wait, follow the money….
RIM doesn’t need to “lay down in front of Apple” but RIM should upgrade all software so that is universal (working on windoz, mac, and linux OS’s) The 2 3rd party app’s are good programs, but there are many things Blackberry Mac users can’t do without the blackberry desktop. RIM should be carrier independent as well as being OS independent.
After thinking about this more I wonder how practical it would be. Since writing this post, I’ve downloaded over 100 MB of content in iTunes. It would take a bit for that to download via EVDO but would be unbearably long over Edge. Unfortunately, none of the really cool phones that people would actually want to use like an iPod are available on carriers that offer EVDO. At least not yet.
Bart makes a really good point.
@hellno
I can’t believe I agree with everything you said. I personally don’t even have a Windows PC at home.
Bandwidth would go through the roof. RIM would only do this if they new the carriers were raising the inclusive data in their BlackBerry tariffs.
When would you actually need to use an application like this? I would think that if you are at your PC and trying to synch a bunch of media to it that it would be easier to just plug your BlackBerry into a USB port on the PC that you’ve downloaded the media to in the first place.
Everyone is comparing this to iTunes but iTunes would really suck if I had to download music to my PC, upload it to Apple’s data center, and then have it pushed back down to my iPod.
The only thing I want this BHS to do is the following and media support is at the absolute bottom of a wishlist.
-Wireless synch my home Outlook client and my Blackberry, so I dont’ have to subscribe to Hosted Exchange and BES synch etc. just simple calendar/contacts/messages synch.
– Provide a desktop BBmessenger client and integration piece that allows sharing of presence data for Iotum like features.
RIM need to look at the way Nokias Message Center works and copy some of the best parts, I disnt need to plug in my Nokia, everything was synched Wirelessly, including data. I could also read all my Messages, email, SMS from my Laptop and write and send SMS picture messages through the Laptop back to the phone. Syncing data and not being able to read my SMS on my laptop are something I really miss.