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The Upcoming “RIM Killer” from Microsoft
Posted February 14, 2006 – 12:43 pm by Yakov Shafranovich in MobileBlogs and magazines have been abuzz recently with the upcoming “RIM Killer” released by Microsoft targeted at Blackberry users worldwide. The actual functionlity is known as “Direct Push” and is described in one of Microsoft blogs.
In essense “Direct Push” is a propertiary protocol running over HTTP. However, unlike RIM’s solution which uses an intermideary NOC to store the email, DirectPush simply provides this ability to Exchange users without a requirement for an intermideary (and pricy fees). However, in essense RIM users will be exchanging one propertiery solutions for another.
A better way maybe to go with open standards as this article suggests. If in essense, all this does is check the Exchange server every few minutes, there is no reason why IMAP or POP3 with server-side storage cannot do the trick the same way. I myself have been trying out SnapperMail which provides Blackberry-like functionality on a Palm without requirement for custom protocols. Rather, it uses IMAP and POP3.
Of course giving up custom protocols opens up ability to install any mail server you want. Any reason why RIM or Microsoft might hate that idea?
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One Response to “The Upcoming “RIM Killer” from Microsoft”
Note that if the IMAP server supports the IDLE extension - Cyrus does, for example - then there’s no need to poll: the server notifies the idle client when anything interesting happens.
By Tony Finch on Feb 15, 2006