Does anyone know if there are any plans to "upgrade" the BlackBerry Internet Service? Make it quicker, make it more user-friendly, make it more like GMails? I have 2 personal email accounts that are not routed/controlled (not sure of the correct terminology) with a BES.
Would love to continue to use Outlook but I have to go thru the emails 2 times (once on the BlackBerry and then in Outlook). I have a corporate email account which is running on BES and while I'm at the office I use Lotus and everything is synced nicely with the BlackBerry but then again that's only with my corporate email account.
My issues is with my personal email accounts in which the messages are "duplicated" unless I use the BlackBerry Internet Service then everything is synced. But I'm just having a difficult time getting use to the clonking user interface for BlackBerry Internet Service.
At this time, I forward all personal email to my GMAIL account -- I no longer use Outlook or Thunderbird for my personal desktop email (although I use Thunderbird once a month to backup email to my PC). Since GMAIL mirrors my blackberry.net and I use forwarding, the only inconvenience I have is the occasional "Mark As Read" operation I have to do in GMAIL, because the read flag is not synchronized for my non-BES account.
When I reply to personal messages on my BlackBerry, the "From:" is replaced with another email address (other than blackberry.net) so all replies goes to GMAIL. So whenever I need to check my BlackBerry messages, I go to GMAIL rather than my BWC - because everything sent to my BlackBerry is also in GMAIL. No messing with BWC's interface, and at least GMAIL makes marking all unread messages as read a very easy operation.
It's not a perfect system, but it works. The GMAIL HTML interface also works very nicely through the BlackBerry browser, if I simply want to check messages that have been filtered from being sent to my BlackBerry.
I'm not sure how the BIS can be made more like Gmail, because they seem to serve two completely different functions. But assuming you're not already on T-Mobile, this is probably the extent of any upgrade you're likely to see in the foreseeable future:
With T-Mobile's system, POP mail delivered to the BB can be deleted from both the BB and server, so the mail wouldn't show up in Outlook unless you have Outlook continuously polling for mail. And with Yahoo accounts, the mail is delivered immediately, without the polling lag. For mail that is simply forwarded to the BB, it's pretty much the same as the old system, with the same mail going to both the BB and desktop client.
The T-Mobile system is what I wish I had! I currently have a Nextel 7520.
With fowarding my email to GMail, I will still be faced with duplicate copies of my emails. When I said I wish BIS was more like GMail, I was talking more about it usability and quickness. I find the user interface for BIS kinda clunky and very slow.
aplrocks, now I understand. But interestingly, with T-Mobile's system, there is no longer a BIS interrface, at least for mail. You can set up your accounts on the T-Mobile website, but there's no longer any mail handling...you pretty much have to go through Yahoo for that kind of functionality. And there's basically no web handling of mail sent to your blackberry.net account.
BlackBerry Internet Service
I currently have a Nextel 7520. 
