Preface

The BlackBerry has come from relative obscurity to omnipresence in a very short amount of time. How was Research In Motion, a relatively small Canadian company, able to steal the thunder from the dominant players in the handheld arena and revive what was becoming a lackluster market? The Internet's original killer app: email. For years no handheld could match the BlackBerry's knack for email. From the small but usable QWERTY keyboard to the push technology that delivers email to a device as it's received, BlackBerry has reached a level to which even the largest players in the industry must scramble to catch up.

Meanwhile, RIM is intent on conquering other aspects of the mobile user experience such as web browsing and secure corporate data access. RIM continues to pour improvements not only into the device itself, but the entire BlackBerry platform. Everyone from the end user to the BlackBerry administrator to the developer will find conveniences in the BlackBerry that don't exist on other platforms. In this book, you'll find clever uses for some of these enhancements and new tricks for using some features that have been there from the beginning.