Following up our initial walk through of native email, calendar and contacts on BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2 earlier this week, we followed up with Michael Clewley from the PlayBook team to get some better insight and understanding of exactly how everything is working on PlayBook OS 2 to deliver an uncompromising experience. With native email on the PlayBook using ActiveSync as a transport, we weren't quite clear as to what the ongoing need/role of RIM's famous NOC (Network Operating Center) would be going forward.
As you'll see in the video above, RIM is still leveraging the NOC throughout the BlackBerry experience. OTA updates, App World, etc. all leverage the NOC, and even the email experience relies on it, allowing for super easy setup - users just enter the email address and password and the NOC takes care of setting everything up on the backend (no having to figure out annoying SMTP blah blah blah stuff). And for enterprise users, RIM is still adding a layer of security and compression beyond ActiveSync.
As for performance, we finish up the walk through with a little test, and suffice to say the push email is as pushy as ever. I don't really care how it works, as long as it works well. Check out the video above. If you have questions on any of this stuff, Michael does a great job here of going through it all. The discussion has me thinking it might be time to rebrand the BlackBerry NOC to just be the BlackBerry Cloud Services (BBCS doesn't sound as cool as BBID though) or something like that. The NOC does a lot!