What Blackberry Is For Outlook/Exchange, Android Is For Google Apps

IF you install the expensive blackberry integration stuff, no? Our company uses exchange but won't install that after market blackberry server something-or-other. As a result, my Droid, with native exchange sync, gets MUCH better service than my coworkers with the blackberries.

Is there a way to read email from a different service, using an android phone? Because I am thinking of getting a droid, but I would rather not give google access to all my mail.

What Blackberry is to Exchange: a device that doesn't sync calendar and contacts until you plug it into your desktop computer using unreliable client software. A device which syncs email, if you give your windows domain username and password to the cellular phone company so they can check using Exchange Web Services and proxy the email on to the blackberry.

What he describes is Blackberry + blackberry enterprise server + Exchange. Which is a bit silly these days, since there are phones which speak Activesync over the air directly to Exchange, including iPhones, Nokias and Windows Mobiles, and that can include calendars and contacts.

Since Google's Phone does not require you to give your Google password to a third party network company so they can proxy a subset of the information to you, nor does it require you to buy and locally install server software to proxy between Google App Store and your phone, the comparison isn't very good.

> But I just could not get Outlook or any other Exchange client to scale to the size of mailbox I operate

Cue: Me, the grumpy IT guy saying "well operate a smaller mailbox then! Are you going for an award for most misused text messaging system in history? Are you that desperate to have weeks and weeks of archives at your fingertips yet also too stubborn to get a proper archiving solution?"