Blackberry: The New Palm?
["Blackberry: The New Palm," by Aaron Johnson, originally appeared at blackberryblog.com]A couple years ago it was all the rage to give university students a Palm Pilot (or require that they purchase one) with the stated goal of "... advancing the students technically." With PDA sales in the tank and with Blackberries becoming the de-facto standard for business users, it only makes sense that the Univerity of Maryland is giving them away to all of its full-time MBA students this fall. Eerily, "... the university says it's trying to make students technologically savvy."
Schools might be giving Blackberries away instead of Palms nowadays, but the real story is how the name "Blackberry" [1], [2], [3] is replacing "Palm" as the name brand associated with email/scheduling/tasks etc, which can only be good for RIM. I think it's a reflection of what's important to business users: we all need tasks, calendaring, etc.., but we live and die with email. In fact, a ZDNET report quotes Gartner as saying that "... 80 percent of workers will use wireless email by 2008." That's alot of Blackberries.
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