“The Very Popular Blackberry Internet Service”

Monday, June 15, 2009

By Sajid

Now that we carry so much of our lives on our easy-to-lose phones, the ability to sync personal data between the phone and a reliable storage service is more important than ever. According to a new study by Funambol, which provides “cloud sync” services for smartphones, there’s a big gap between the services offered by wireless carriers and what’s available on consumer desktops. AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile offer little, if anything, beyond address book syncing. They’re missing an opportunity to make themselves into a sync brand and lock in customers by syncing more kinds of data. As long as they don’t deliver, consumers will likely sync through cloud services like Microsoft My Phone, Mobile Me or Funambol.

The study assigned points to different sync features. Two obvious patterns occurred in the results shown below. (Funambol did the study, so we note their high self-rating with a grin.)

First, the very popular BlackBerry Internet Service lags other cloud sync services in features. Possibly, BlackBerry wants to avoid undermining sales of its own BlackBerry Enterprise Server. ”BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) scored lower than the rest because it only provides push email,” Funambol VP of marketing Hal Steger wrote VentureBeat. “It does not sync contacts, calendars, tasks, notes, photos or anything else, and it has a very minimal web portal.”

Second, wireless carriers simply have not implemented as many features as the cloud sync vendors. That means they’re unlikely to become their customers’ preferred sync solution. Which means that customers will have one less reason to stick around rather than change carriers for a better price.

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