Mac Gets BlackBerry Desktop Manager, Finally
RIM must have finally snapped to what a lot of BlackBerry owners could have told the company a long time ago. BlackBerry owners use Macs, too, at least a lot of them do. It’s not smart to assume that all Mac owners use iPhones; there are quite a lot of Crackberries among the Mac faithful. The lack of Mac support for the BlackBerry Desktop Manager (BDM) should have been an embarrassment for RIM, and perhaps it finally realized that, as there is official word of the Desktop Manager appearing on the Mac platform in September of this year.
The BDM for Mac looks to be as full-featured as the Windows version:
- Sync your iTunes® playlists, calendars, contacts, notes and tasks
- Add/Remove applications
- Update your device when new software becomes available
- Backup and restore your device data with such features like automatically scheduled backups and optional encryption
- Manage multiple devices
That first item makes me wonder, will Apple shut down the BlackBerry support like it did the Pre’s? Mac owners should sign up on the Mac BDM site to get notified when this new version is available.
(via Inside BlackBerry)
BlackBerry Media Sync has supported iTunes sync for a while, which leads me to believe Apple is licensing some iTunes sync tech to RIM. If true, there’s no reason to think that Apple will block it in the Mac version of BDM. We know that Palm didn’t license anything from Apple. They hacked a workaround.
September? I want it TODAY!
Media Sync for BB reads the XML file containing your playlists, and simply copies over the MP3 or AAC files that are referenced in it. Unless apple starts encrypting the library.xml file, it should continue to work as is.