Jed get's a Blackberry...

Sadly at the moment all the techbods at Nowcomm have to carry the Support phone on a rota basis. I don't mind being on call, but when you have to carry round a Nokia E60, the embarrassment factor is through the roof! I mean, just look at it...

So as a demontration for a customer what Blackberry is like (And furthermore, how well it works with Cisco Unified Messaging - the new curve is able to play voicemail WAV attachments!) we ended up with a couple of Blackberries to play with for an undetermined amount of time. The two devices are the BlackBerry 8120...

...and the BlackBerry 8310:

Personally I felt the 8120 felt quite tacky to feel, put perhaps i'm used to using re-assuring heavy devices? Both BlackBerry's were very very light!

Once i'd figured out the interface on the 8310 (Now the support phone) I was very impressed with the features, format and battery life of the device. Though the viewing of attachments such as Excel files didnt work as well as i'd hoped. If only we had Push Email working on Windows Smartphones...

Dual Mode Phones take their first big leap

Woohoo cheers Cisco!

On the front page of their site they have a news post with a little gem in it. We're finally going to see the first SCCP load for a non-Nokia phone (For the record, the E60, E61 and E65 are utter crap - don't buy one!).

The featured device is a HP iPAQ 600 series phone based on Microsoft Mobile. Hopefully this will pave the way towards more and more Microsoft based devices running in harmony with Cisco CallManager:


I definitely can't wait! Imagine a device that is the pinnacle of mobility and productivity in the future. The following features would be nice!

• Dual Mode (Wireless and GSM)


• Push Email


• GPS


• Touch functionaity


• MP3 player (DVB based TV onboard would be cool too!)


• Camera with flash

Nice one Cisco!

Cisco and their amusing marketing

I have to say that Cisco have done some rather marvelous (Though slightly woolly) marketing in terms of the "Human Network". The latest campaign shows how people in the movie industry use mobility to continue working efficiently.

Interestingly enough they use rebranded OQO2's in the video ;) See, I told everyone UMPC's are the way forward!

But that aside, it looks like Cisco will be pushing their Mobile products (for Blackberry at least for the moment) and I can't wait to get this software onto my Microsoft Smartphone. For some reason (When i've asked Cisco about this in the past) they seem to be very quiet on the Microsoft front; but what i'd eventually like to do is run SCCP/SIP software on my smartphone so that when I walk into the office my phone automatically associates with the wireless and I get dual-mode operation. We're already using this on Nokia E60 and E61 phones in the office and it works great :) But at least I can get Personal Communicator functionality on my Smartphone soon enough.

I can't wait!