BlackBerry Connect renders M600i useless

It's now a few weeks that I own my M600i from SonyEricsson (SE). It's a great smartphone and quite handy. I only made the mistake to install BlackBerry Connect on it to get my company's outlook mail and calendar pushed to my mobile.

After connecting my smartphone to my company's BlackBerry Enterprise Server, it downloaded - among other things - the IT policies. And that was when the trouble started. Cause my company's policies prescribe device lock has to be switched on, the BlackBerry Connect client switched the device lock on on my mobile which was quite neat before that.

You probably might wonder why I'm complaining about that. Set the inactivitity timeout to about 30 minutes or so and you're done you might say. While that's the solution for probably all other mobiles currently available, it is not for SE's M600i. The inactivity timeout for the device lock is fixed to 60 seconds. After every 60 seconds of inactivity my M600i now forces me to key in my password before I can use it, no matter what I want to do. Only picking up incoming calls doesn't require the password. Who else is forced to key in her/his password virtually every time she/he uses her/his phone?

In BlackBerry's Knowledge Base I found KB-05199 which compares the features supported by the different SE phones, P910, P990i and M600i. And this article states: device lock isn't supported on SE devices. Hm? According to my experience this article is outdated now. I can tell you that BlackBerry Connect at least switched on device lock on my device!

However, BlackBerry isn't to blame here. It's SE who is to blame! Why do they hardwire the inactivity timeout to 60 seconds? Why don't they provide the ability for users to change this timeout to a more reasonable value (e.g. 30 minutes)?

Anyone else having this problem? Any suggestion other that getting rid of BlackBerry Connect until this is fixed by SE to be able to switch off device lock again?

Ciao

B

Update (13.02.2007): installing the latest version (3.45) of BlackBerry Connect on my device worked around the problem. After the update, it forgot the IT plocies and didn't reload them. So for now, i don't have IT policies in place, including the evil device lock...

Maybe I should have done more research on what platform I use for my blog. I thought, it would be a good idea to use Google's Blogger as you can see. However, Blogger doesn't support Safari! This post says they are still working on it, so I hope in the near future I will have all options available to edit postings etc. in Safari as well. Until then, it seems I have to use Firefox for now.

According to Market Share, Safari is number three with a market share of 4.24%. I wonder why it takes so long to fix the problems with Safari, the post mentioned above is from September 2006 and here is a post dating back to November 2005 mentioning the same probs.

Ciao

B

Hello world,

yes, that's my first blog post. Now that everyone has her/his own blog, I decided to finally try it out myself too. My blog has an English title and a German subtitle cause I plan to post both in English as well as in German.

Cause I'm not sure yet whether the blog will have a specific subject, I thought Random Thoughts (Gedanken über dies und das...) would be a cool title for this blog. Naive to believe I would be the first one with this idea. I hope Howard Greenstein, Frank Prengel, Dan Gottlieb, A.K.M. Adams, ladosy, Steve Lacey and all the others don't mind that I had the same idea they had. And also apologies to all the others Google digged out and I was too lazy to mention...

Ciao

B