RIM announces Web Signals, will push everything to your handset
RIM announced on Tuesday their new Web Signals technology that lets content providers push relevant and timely alerts directly to your Blackberry. Like SMS alerts on steroids, the new Web Signals will alert Blackberry users of the latest news, weather, sports, entertainment, financial information, etc. You won’t get plain old 160 character text alerts sent out en masse at regular intervals; the new Blackberry alerts will be automatically generated when new content is published and will provide one-click access to the associated online content. Can you see the content providers jumping for joy as they envision large increases in site traffic? Oh, yeah. Can you also see Blackberry users sinking under a deluge of push content? Nah, we didn’t think so either. Berryheads love their push content! At launch, RIM has Canada’s CBCNews, Thumbplay, Dada Entertainment, and The Washington Post on board and ready to launch their Web Signals powered alert services. Hey Blackberry users, let’s crank it up a notch and get on with some serious pushing!
I’m happy for RIM. They’re a “good” company that makes “good” products. Kinda sad that their entire line of products was outsold by the iPhone last quarter, which is amazing since, you know, that copy-and-paste is so important. I wonder if the timing of this announcement has anything to do with the afternoon news? Hmmm. . .
@Perspective: The timing of the announcement has to do with the fact that the Blackberry Developer’s Conference is going-on today. Despite what you may think, the world does not revolve around the words of Steve Jobs.
Add this to the list of stuff your iPhone won’t do.
(cue Apple fanboys)
ouch that one is harsh! you should watch your tongue around them apple fanboys, they tend to fight dirty! wtf is with the obsession of steve jobs recently?
Not bad RIM… I’m happy this came out finally. There should be more companies wanting to provide this service to their customers. But the only flaw I see with this new “web signals” service is it will probably go right over the data caps set by the carriers.
I have an iPhone 3G and I run though 5GB easily every month if I actually use my iPhone a lot. (And that’s without this “web signals” service)
This is fantastic!
Good for u
I go thru 7gbs a day and I don’t complain
All it is, is just a glorified rss feed which by all means woo hoo
More stuff I can get without actually using my bb to find it
F’EN awesome
Perspective,
You can play that card when Apple goes public with the breakdown of upgrades from the first iPhone versus new users. Until then, that factoid is meaningless because for all you know 80% of that number could be upgrades.
@James
I might be wrong on this since I haven’t actually read about this in-depth, but isn’t this the same concept as Apple’s push notification service more or less? Pushed alerts, notifications, etc, to the device in the background?
Apples ‘push’ is more like wait and pull.
And where, oh where is the Apple push notification support for the iPhone? We’re a while past September, aren’t we? Maybe RIM will beat them to it.
I am looking forward to this on the Storm. I get tired of having to check RSS feeds all the time.
@Perspective
RIM shipped 6.1 million devices last quarter which may or may not be less than the iPhone (I haven’t checked) but the funny thing is they shipped 6.1 million devices without anything really new to offer.
The Bold is just coming to the states now and wasn’t available for most of the quarter in the countries that it’s been released in. The Pearl Flip is just coming out now. The storm is just coming out now.
What do you think will happen to sales when all these new devices that people are dying for come out?
If RIM can keep up with the iPhone sales by selling old curves and pearls, I think that looks better on them, don’t you?
Everyone please stop responding to Perspective. He has never made a smart comment on BGR.EVER. He’s a fanboy who talks just for the sake of it…without any facts or notion of the exact post he’s writing on. Obviously this is a RIM post but he feels the need to jump in head first and say something about the iPhone. Barring that the phone pales in comparison to blackberries and what they can do, this post has nothing to even do with the iPhone. It is idiots like this that makes BGR look bad.
I don’t understand how this is different from pushed content before. I used to get weather alerts through pushed messages, and also Olympics news and updates. How exactly is this new and different?
@BG:
I was under the impression that Apple’s background notification was more for things along the lines of IM applications (AIM, Gtalk, MSN messenger, Yahoo! Messenger). You know, things that Blackberrys have been doing for years.
Either way, neither service is live yet, so I guess we’ll wait and see?
@James –yes, that’s what apple’s push service is for. It’s conceptually a lot different than this BB story.
Maybe I missed it scanning through the press release, but when is this going to be available?
I have an iPhone and a blackberry curve.. so basically any phone news these days is exciting haha.
For the people commenting on bandwidth caps and such, why not get unlimited? I know it’s not _really_ unlimited, but a glorified RSS reader isn’t going to send you over the limit. I use a couple GB a month on my iPhone and not a whole lot on the blackberry, even though they’re both 3g devices. I’d use a lot less on my iPhone if it had a RSS reader with content pushed to it.
Push is the way to go with everything, argh Apple why are you so slow to open up that functionality??
not saying the iphone or blackberry is better (though i do have my opinion)
but this feature is something that apple announced they are working on from the summer. . they did delay it , and i am disappointed . . but it will show up eventually, and apple did have the idea first. .
basically to free up the iphone from running background apps, apple is hosting a notification server that will let app’s receive signals from apple notification server that are received from aim or facebook or whatever service ..
saving battery and processor cycles and only allowing one pipe in to the phone, via apples servers . .
seems very similar to what blackberry is announcing , but not quite the same. .
i wouldnt be surprised if this was bb’s inspiration . .
i mean . . its obvious what the storms inspiration was.
No one can make the “who copied who” arguement 100% one way or the other. But the point could be brought up that BB has been a pioneer in push technology for quite some time now, and that just about all push-related concepts were inspired by BB (if someone wanted to bring up that point that is
. Besides, it doesn’t really matter who came up with it 1st. That’s the way industries work: someone comes up with a good idea and everybody else copies it; it’s whoever “does it the best” who wins in the end. So I guess we’ll just have to wait and see who “does it the best”.
Valiantineus: well put
motech said, “Valiantineus: well put”
same to you motech
@mr Hi-Definition: It’s easy to go through 5GB on the iPhone when surfing because the iPhone doesn’t do any compression at all when fetching webpages. A single visit to Slashdot easily pulls in 700k+ of data. If you’re on a BlackBerry, most of the time you will be getting stuff compressed by their MDS, so data usage will be much much less. Web signals looks like it’s intended to be used for pushing notifications which are even more lightweight on data usage than webpages, so I doubt it’ll blow through your data cap unless you go overboard on the number of push services you sign up for.
I’m sure Thumbplay and Dada Entertainment were so happy to be included. They are the scourge of cell phone SPAM and manage to get their hooks into our corporate cell lines all the time (and then go on to charge $9.99 per month).
Great, enhanced spam for BlackBerry. I’ll pass.
since when did bbs have a 5gb cap for data? maybe its a soft cap, but not like the aircards. also
@kansei : is your curve with vzw sprint or alltel? because im pretty sure att doesnt have a 3g blackberry
Apple and others are several years behind RIMs push technology. It’ll take a massive investment for them to catch up.
Regular consumers may not care, but decision makers in the business world like the fact that their emails are guaranteed to be delivered.
According to RIMs CEOs the Storm has been in the works for years by the way.
The notification stuff has certainly been possible for years with RIM, they just never got round to marketing the feature – until recently they were focussed on the business market.
You have to admire Apples ability to market their presentation software, but they’re hardly innovative when it comes to hardware and networking.