While the press has been trumpeting the pending demise of the Blackberry Messaging Service in the US thanks to greedy patent lawyers clutching a dead man’s patents, a simple blog post that claims to hold the secret to the Blackberry’s survival has gone little-noticed. If true, it would appear that someone involved in the case has violated their non-disclosure agreement, and yet may work to quell the fears of Crackberry addicts everywhere.
This blog post claims to be from someone who has seen not one, but two potential workarounds that Research in Motion has devised that would presumably continue service without infringing on NTP’s patents. The identity of the poster is not revealed, and it is the only post in this blog. Presumably if this person did reveal who they were, they’d be in a lot trouble, but of course the unverifiability of the posts casts doubt on its credibility.
Even so, the workaround as described would indeed be interesting, and while it poses a potential annoyance to some people, it would still make the Blackberry Service quite workable for the vast majority of users.
Specifically, the anonymous blogger writes, the workarounds take advantage of the fact that NTP patents, when written, don’t take into account the advent of two-way messaging:
The NTP patents have (at the very least) a singular weakness. They are all limited to a one-way (push) email systems. At the time the NTP Patents were filed, two-way pagers had yet to be invented and they were not contemplated by the NTP patents. Hence, NTP’s inventions do not cover a two-way pager or system that would be required to push only the header (not the actual email message) to the pager and enable retrieval of remotely stored email based on a transmission from the pager – One-way pagers cannot transmit anything.
Is it really that simple? Push only the headers of a message, and then make the RIM device pull the body of the message to enable the user to read?
Technically, the workaround makes sense. In fact, current RIM devices already have a facility that limits the size of the body of an e-mail message that is pushed to the device. If a colleague sends a particularly long-winded e-mail, the device will only receive the first 2k or so of a message, and then as the recepient scrolls towards the end, the device will request the rest of the message, pulling the remainder of the text before the user notices that the message was cut off. This is known as the “Auto More” feature.
The post also claims that RIM is already testing this workaround, on a select number of Blackberry users who for the most part, are completely unaware they are the subject of this test.
Of course, the usual questions remain. If it’s this simple, why not just release basic details of this workaround to the public, so that Blackberry users aren’t afraid of losing the service they’ve become addicted to? RIM has been way too quiet about what it has planned, and it makes people wonder if they really do have a workable plan.