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Thursday

The Death of the Non Camera-Berry???

blackberry-camera

This week, for the first time I realised that a non camera-berry is about to become a thing of the past. A couple of years ago when rumours of the Pearl first surfaced, we were all surprised that RIM would be breaking the mold of the corporate blueprint and producing a device which had both a camera and external storage. Since then, we’ve all come to expect it with the later generation Pearl and Curve series. The 8800 was, of course, the exception, but with the evolution of the Curve with embedded GPS and the Bold just around the corner, we all know that the 8800 is probably on borrowed time… especially as its wholesale price continues to be higher than the more functional (and user preferred) Curve.

So we know the Bold is around the corner and of course the Thunder will come in due course (my guess is they’ll drag it to market just in time for Christmas), and we know that both devices will sport built in cameras. Throw in the BlackBerry 8200 flip-phone series into the camera-happy devices, once the 8800 begins its inevitable production slow down and eventual retirement, which is likely sometime this year, this potentially leaves a hole for those that want a device with no camera.

Is this a problem?

In all reality, probably not. Yes, there are plenty of organisations out there that forbid the use of camera phones on site. RIM’s justification in not having a non-camera device would be that customers in a BES environment should long since be running on BES 4.1 Service Pack 2 (the service pack which originally presented the option of locking out the device camera via IT policy), so there’s no excuse for not having a later service pack than that. A quick scan of the BlackBerry.com download page shows the date of availability for SP2 was 12th September 2006. As for companies not running BES, an organisation having BlackBerry devices and not running a BES is unlikely to be fussing about camera usage – if they were that bothered about security then they would be running a BES in the first place.

I think the message going forward here is very clear though – RIM will keep producing devices that have everything under the hood. If companies don’t want that functionality for their users, then they should be implementing and managing any required restrictions from the BES IT Policies.

Written by BlackBerryForums.com user BBAdmin