Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Open Source BlackBerry

Now, I have been caught on tape beating a BlackBerry once, but we left in good terms. So much that today we have announced we actually love the BlackBerry...

Funambol has released two clients for BlackBerry today:
  1. A push-email client, with integrated address book. Why would you need it?? Well, if you are like most, together with your work like, you also have a personal life. If you don't, then forget it, we do not like you anyway ;-) If you do, you might want to keep your BlackBerry email client for your enterprise life (with its own address book), but now you can get a separate client to check your personal email (e.g. AOL, Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, any POP/IMAP, and so on). The address book is separated, but it is synced on the device. So it is fast
  2. A PIM-sync client, a tool to synchronize on your BlackBerry contacts, calendar, task and notes (also known as PIM), coming from the Funambol server. This is for those who do not like BIS (BlackBerry Internet Service) that much, because it does not sync your PIM stuff on the device. It is a full BlackBerry experience, with a consumer angle. And it is open source, extensible, it supports a lot of backends and more.
On my BlackBerry, I have both. I use myFUNAMBOL and I push my Outlook to it (with the Funambol Outlook plug-in). And I get both push email and PIM sync on my phone.

How do you get them? The push-email client signing up on myFUNAMBOL. It is delivered to your phone, no sweat. The PIM-sync connecting your BlackBerry browser to http://my.funambol.com/bb/plugin.jad.

Here you have a brief video of me using the Funambol BlackBerry client. It is just the first release, but it is quite good, in my opinion. And it is obviously all open source (actually, the PIM sync has been built pretty much by the community, with zero or so help by Funambol employees... I love open source ;-) More to come, stay tuned.