BIS 3.0 is coming to North American BlackBerry users after its EMEA launch, including modest upgrades like WMA and OpenOffice file support, and the more sought-after feature of two-way Gmail sync soon thereafter, according to an internal update notice.
“There will be scheduled network maintenance by Research In Motion (RIM) affecting BIS customers between 0100 CT / 0200 EDT on March 28th and 0500 CT / 0600 EDT on March 28th.”
During that time, you won’t be able to do much with your BlackBerry, but afterwards, most of the new features should be in place. Last we heard official word, the sync and a few extras, like label creation/deletion, would be deployed by way of the Enhanced Gmail Plug-In, but latest docs tell us the sync will be included in BIS at a later date, and rolled-out over the course of the Spring, region by region. The label creation and deletion will still be packaged into the plug-in.
BlackBerry has been able to support one-way sync with Gmail via IMAP for awhile now, but since an Android handset can do Gmail just about as well as BlackBerry does Exchange email, this two-way sync really is necessary for RIM to at least keep pace with Google. BIS 3.0 on its own will be a bit ho-hum, but once that plug-in gets updated, a lot of BlackBerry-users (bother enterprise and otherwise) will be pretty danged happy.
[via CrackBerry]