It's been a long time since I've seen anyone with anything other than a Hotmail, GMail, or ISP email account. The the former two offering Exchange access, I'm not sure it is beyond the average user.

I'm a little ignorant when it comes to RIM's stuff although I do understand what BES is. What I wondered though, especially with regards to people saying if you dont have BES you might as well not have a BB - or something like that, is what's BBM and how does that differ from other messaging clients?

Fundamentally, it's exactly like text messaging. The difference is it doesn't go via your telephone service provider, it goes via RIM. And it's free, to any user in the world as long as you know their phone's Blackberry ID. Oh, it is only Blackberry to Blackberry though, you can't send a BBM to someone with an iPhone.

To me, it's kind of... it's another thing where BB's used to be better than the competition (It's messaging! And it's free!) but these days.. I mean, who here with a contract phone actually uses their text message allocation every month? I can't remember exactly what mine is but i think I worked out I'd have to send a text message very 10 minutes or so every day to use it up in a month. I won't ever do that. Obviously, if you're a teenager and you're spending your life text messaging then fine but I suspect your teenager these days isn't - they're spending most of their life on Facebook which also offers free messaging services and you don't have to have a particular brand of handset to take advantage of it.

I'm sure some people find it useful. And it may be different in the States, where they still tend to get charged per message on mobile phone contracts. And it would be useful if one of you was abroad, as sending texts from abroad doesn't tend to be covered by your free allocation and data charges can be high too.

Jon

It does more than text messaging. You get little "d" next to the sent message when the message is delivered and when person reads the message "d" changes to "r" to indicate that message was read. I think that is useful especially if you are communicating with busy people so you know they have read it even if they didn't reply.

You can create chats with unique subjects, end chats and start new ones so the history between two people is not just one long chat. You can have many different chats with diff. subjects. You can archive them, email them, look for the by the date etc. Very similar to the way you would use email.

You can also create groups of people for chat.

You can send pictures, voice notes, files, BB maps location, BBM messenger contact or a BB contact to another BB.

It is very reliable and there are no delays with delivering the message. Sometimes it takes 10-15 minutes for my texts to be delivered after I switch my phone on or when I come out of the underground. BBM chat get to me straight away after my BB connected to the BIS server.
Also when the mobile network is congested and you can't send SMS (e.g. NYE) BBM works without problems. During the 9/11 BBs worked (for BBM and emails) as long as you had a data connection. But you couldn't call or text because the network couldn't handle those volumes.

Little piece on security: http://crackberry.com/pin-pin-messaging-secure

Also I can take the SIM card out of my phone and still get all my e-mails and BB message over WiFi.