As hinted at in their conference call last night, RIM will be rolling out a new feature for BlackBerry Enterprise Server that will allow employers to maintain the secure, locked-down BlackBerry experience they want, while letting end-users take advantage of the open, install-whatever-you-want experience your average consumer gets to enjoy. How this will be specifically implemented is a unclear, but it will apparently be seamless in that features that were inaccessible before suddenly work. Odds are, RIM is just finding a way to partition the flow of data so work e-mails and network access can be unperturbed by the freewheeling open web. It doesn’t sound like this feature will necessarily be tied to OS 6, luckily.
RIM’s interest in the consumer market has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last couple of years, but it’s had trouble shedding the image of a company-issued ball-and-chain. Through management controls, corporate BlackBerrys are usually unable to install applications, themes, or access any number of different features. The especially tight companies will even block the camera from working.
I think this is a great move on RIM’s part to begin seducing end-users in enterprises, rather than just the CIOs. Security has always been paramount for BlackBerry devices, but as a result, many of the people who ended up using the phones saw them as little more than sources of work and stress. By loosening up a bit and offering users more options (while still maintaining the security that made BlackBerry such a success in the first place), RIM stands to truly create the all-in-one lifestyle product that they’ve been aiming for. There’s definitely potential BlackBerrys to sap productivity because they’re too fun, but I suspect that BES admins would have finely-granulated control over when it’s time to play and when it’s time to work.
[via Inside BlackBerry]