Roundup: the best new BlackBerry apps at WES 2010
If you get the new Pearl 3G with 25MB of memory, what are the new business apps you’ll want on it?
BlackBerry users are downloading a million apps a day from RIM's BlackBerry App World store and many developers used RIM's Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES) to launch new applications.
Interestingly, several of these are enterprise versions of apps that are already available in App World, like gwabbit BES and Poynt.
The enterprise version of the Poynt local search app is packaged up ready to be pushed out to handsets from BES and it disables the update feature so that admins know their users are only running versions of Poynt that they've tested.
The BES version of gwabbit also packages up the gwabbit app but, more importantly for some enterprises, it puts the recognition engine that finds contact details in incoming emails on the BlackBerry behind your corporate firewall instead of using gwabbit's own servers.
If you work in a regulated industry or you're just concerned about the security of having information from business emails going to another company, this lets you get the productivity benefits of not having to search through old messages for email addresses and phone numbers without worrying about the audit trail.
DriveSafe.ly is the kind of BlackBerry app businesses are likely to want to provide for workers who have a BlackBerry and who have to drive as part of their job. If your employees are reading texts in a company car on a company BlackBerry and they have an accident, there could be liability issues. DiveSafe.ly turns on automatically when they pair with the Bluetooth in their car. It converts text messages, emails and caller ID for incoming calls to speech using a cloud service and reads them out.
With DriveSafe.ly Enterprise the text and audio are encrypted and you can push the app out through BES using policies to control who gets it. The $49 annual price is cheaper than the $79 you'd pay for DriveSafe.ly Professional but it's still pricey.
You can also use it to track employee locations and get alerts if they drive out of the area you expect them to be in.
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