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Rollout: RIM's BlackBerry Connect: Page 3 of 5

Consumers may eventually see Treo models with BlackBerry Connect preloaded, but neither Research in Motion nor Palm has promised such an option. Meanwhile, the software is free for customers who purchased their Treo 650 after August 30, 2005, and costs $10 for anyone with an older model.

Installation is straightforward, if a bit more cumbersome than over-the-air activation or BlackBerry Manager. An administrator must first create a BES account for the user. Then the BlackBerry Connect software can be installed on a client PC with Outlook and a MAPI profile that matches the one defined on the BES server. Palm's data-synch tool, HotSync, then installs the BlackBerry Connect client and the latest version of VersaMail. The entire process took us only a few minutes, though we had to run it twice because the MAPI profile was not defined properly on our client PC the first time.

Great UI, Mediocre Manager

Given the tight integration between the BlackBerry handhelds and the BES platform, we doubted BlackBerry Connect would perform well. The end-user experience, however, exceeded our expectations. E-mails and calendar events were pushed to our Treo 650 in short order. Security is ensured with end-to-end Triple DES encryption. E-mails are pushed into Palm's native VersaMail client, where BlackBerry Connect acts as another account. Likewise, calendar events are automatically synchronized between the Outlook calendar and the Treo 650's native calendar application.

Full PIM sync is not available with BlackBerry Connect for the Treo 650. While BlackBerry OS-powered models, such as the BlackBerry 8700c we tested, will synchronize e-mail, contacts, tasks, notes and calendars, the BlackBerry Connect client will handle only e-mail and calendar entries. Address lookup is partially available through BlackBerry's Remote Lookup feature, which will query the back-end global address book and return any entries it finds (basically anyone in Active Directory). Although this is somewhat useful, it's not nearly as convenient as keeping all your Outlook contacts in sync with your wireless device.