One commonly cited reason why RIM’s would-be iPad killer sucks is that it doesn’t even have email and calendar support natively. To get the PlayBook to run email, you have to tether it to your BlackBerry, which is just stupid.
It’s about to get stupider, though. A new report is suggesting that the PlayBook doesn’t suck at email so much by design as by a complete lack of foresight. It might actually be impossible for the PlayBook to do email natively… at least without RIM radically overhauling their backend.
Here’s the problem, according to a source who consulted with a director of BlackBerry Product Management.
According to this director, the BlackBerry Email System is completely incapable of allowing two devices to access the same account. This worked just fine when people just carried a BlackBerry in their pocket and updated it occasionally with a new device, but now that people are carrying around tablets, the BES just cant cope.
“The Blackberry email system is the BES — which is the source/focus of all the famous BB security. The BES email server has the concept of one user = one device (or they call it PIN).”
When RIM built its system it didn’t see ahead to realize there would be a time when a user could have a smartphone and a tablet. So now it has “significant work to make the BES support multiple devices.”
RIM should be able to rearchitect its system, but our source points out, it’s “a lot of work to change something that’s pretty basic in the software architecture and design.”
Unbelievable.
