I could be misinformed, but an hour ago I needed to update someone on some weekly stats who is out of the country. He told me to give him a summary as he can't open an XLS attachment on on his Blackberry (one of the new Bolds). If my iPhone can do that, how on Earth could a 'business' smartphone not do that? Please contradict me if I'm wrong; otherwise Blackberry is in far greater need of 'innovation' than this article argues.
My bold can do that, though it's entirely likely he didn't know the path through the menus to open the .xls doc. The office-like suite opens .doc/.xls/.ppt, iirc.
It doesn't render properly 100% of the time, though, whereas my iPhone always seemed to.
I recently did some work porting Hecl to the BB, and just found it to generally be a painful experience. Windows-only, lots of weird stuff, a slow emulator, and a generally odd platform. The actual phones are very nice, but in an iPhone/Android world, I think that's not an edge any longer.
Hey. They're finally going to use WebKit instead of their extremely sucky browser, that's gotta be a start.
I won't worry about BB. They seem to be the only company able to create a smartphone that works (i.e. doesn't crash etc.) at the moment.