Section 33. About Email and Text Messages
33. About Email and Text Messages 23 About Email and the BlackBerry Web Client 34 Compose an Email Message 36 Send a PIN Message 35 Send an SMS Message Text messaging is at the heart of everything that makes BlackBerry devices so useful, and the 7100 series of devices is no exception. Text messaging is a highly efficient method of mobile communication and in many ways is competing with voice telephony communication. It's often easier to receive a text message and reply to it at your own convenience than to answer a live voice call and deal with an issue in real time. This is the primary reason so many business users have adopted the BlackBerry platform as their mobile communication devices of choice. The BlackBerry 7100 has begun to introduce the BlackBerry name to a wider base of users, but business text messaging is still the bread and butter of the BlackBerry family of devices. One potential source of confusion with respect to BlackBerry devices and text messages has to do with what exactly constitutes a text message. You obviously know that it must contain text, but so do Word documents and web pages, and those obviously aren't considered text messages. A text message is a message consisting purely of text (and possibly an attached file or files) that is sent electronically over a network from one place to another. The BlackBerry 7100 series of devices supports the following primary types of text messages: Text message A message consisting purely of text (and possibly an attached file or files) that is sent directly over a network from one place to another. Some email clients , such as Microsoft Outlook, allow you to create email messages that include HTML code similar to that found in web pages. Although HTML-based email messages are technically still considered text messages, they require special formatting to be viewed and therefore don't qualify as text messages under the more strict definition I'm applying to BlackBerry text messages.
The most important thing to take from this list of text message types is the distinction between the first three (email, PIN, and SMS messages) and the last one (instant message). The distinction is that an instant message involves the notion of a live connection between two parties; the other types of messages are delivered regardless of whether anyone is on the other end to receive them when they are sent. This might seem like a minor issue, but it makes a huge difference in terms of how instant messages are handled as compared to email, PIN, and SMS messages. More specifically , the standard BlackBerry Messages application handles email, PIN, and SMS messages together in a seamless manner, while it doesn't handle instant messages at all. To send and receive instant messages, you need an instant messaging (IM) client application. Fortunately, most BlackBerry devices ship with IM clients for AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and ICQ. If you use a different IM service, such as MSN Messenger, you should consider downloading and installing an IM client that works for that service. Alternatively, consider a unified IM client that supports multiple IM servicesyou must download and install this client to your device as well. For more information on BlackBerry IM, take a look at 42 About Instant Messages . Now that you understand the distinction between instant messages and the other three main types of text messages, it's worth taking just a moment to cover the differences between email, PIN, and SMS messages. As you might already know, email messages are routed through email servers and often traverse a variety of network and computer configurations along the way. Email messages are addressed using the familiar name@website.com format, with which most people are familiar. PIN and SMS messages are a bit different from email messages both in terms of how they are delivered and how they are addressed. Email and PIN messages accept file attachments, whereas SMS messages do not. Email and PIN messages are limited in the kinds of attachments that can be opened on your device, although you can forward received messages with other kinds of attachments. In other words, even if your device doesn't support the opening of a particular message attachment, you can still forward the message with the attachment intact. PIN and SMS messages are peer-to-peer messages, which means they don't go through a server in the same way that email does. Instead, they are sent directly from one device to another one, much like a phone call is made directly from one mobile phone to another one. Moreover, PIN and SMS messages are sent solely through your wireless service provider. PIN messages are more limited than SMS messages in that they can be sent only to other BlackBerry devices. Every BlackBerry device has a unique PIN, which serves as the target address for PIN messages. This means you can't send PIN messages to email addresses or other (non-BlackBerry) devices that don't have PINs. Similar to SMS and email addresses, you can store the PIN for a contact in your device's address book. To determine the PIN of your device, scroll to the Tools icon on the Home screen and click the trackwheel. Then scroll to the Settings icon on the Tools screen and click the trackwheel. Finally, scroll down to Status and click the trackwheel once more. Your device's PIN is listed along with other important device information. PIN messages aren't as secure as email messages because they are not encrypted when they are delivered. Be wary of using PIN messages to communicate sensitive information. SMS messages don't suffer from the same limitation as PIN messagesthey can be sent to anyone with a mobile device that supports SMS. And currently, many mobile phones and wireless handheld communicators support SMS. Whereas a PIN uniquely identifies a device for a PIN message, your mobile phone number serves as your unique ID for SMS messaging. So, if a mobile phone or handheld is capable of SMS messaging, you can send the owner a text message by simply addressing the message to her mobile phone number. Not surprisingly, the flexibility of being able to send a quick message to a person by simply addressing the message to her mobile phone number is causing a quick rise in popularity for SMS in North America. (It is already a hit in many other parts of the world.) All this text messaging talk converges with the Messages application on your device, which supports email, PIN, and SMS messages. The benefit of how the BlackBerry 7100 series device supports these message types is that you compose text messages the same way regardless of what type you are sending; the only thing that really distinguishes between an email, a PIN, or an SMS message is how you address it. Before moving on to composing messages, it's worth taking a quick moment to explore the viewing of messages. You access the messages on your device by launching the Messages application, which is a trackwheel click away on the Home screen. To view a message in the main message list, just scroll to select the message and click it with the trackwheel. The message appears and can then be viewed using the following navigational techniques:
Similar navigational techniques apply to email message attachments, which you find out about in 35 View an Email Attachment . |
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