I have been hearing some confirmed reports from readers that BIS 2.8 is live but all the features we listed have not been turned on yet. One of the cool new features that supposedly comes with the BIS 2.8 upgrade (1 week delayed rollout) was a vague new Automatic Login feature. It sounded cool when RIM described it as:
Enhancements to email setup and settings: Automatic Login now supports most billing identifiers, which allows new subscribers with wireless service providers that use PIN, IMEI, or ESN as a billing identifier to create BlackBerry Internet Service accounts from the BlackBerry smartphone, without having to create a login user name and password
Sounds interesting right? Turns out that when RIM released some documentation in their knowledge base describing the feature it no longer sounds so interesting.
- It obviously will only work when connecting to the BIS from your BlackBerrys browser
- You still cannot setup some accounts from the mobile site like Domino or Outlook accounts
- You also cannot modify signatures and filters from the mobile portal
To be able to modify those settings you will need to create a login and password through the mobile site. Once you do this it is a permanent change and you will have to use your login and password on the mobile site from then on. You can confirm this in this Knowledge Base article.
What really annoys me is that RIM has yet to upgrade the BIS service to let you recover your username. (Source) If you don’t know or forgot your username you must call your carrier to get it. You can only imagine how much more of an issue this will be now that users wont need to create an account to use the BIS in 2.8. This is almost as annoying as the fact that you cannot reset the PIN and IMEI associated with your account when you leave a carrier.
Here is to hoping that RIM & carriers turn on the Google 2 way contact sync soon to put a better spin on BIS 2.8.
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Posted: September 15, 2009 at 4:55 PM EST from my BlackBerry 8900
Being someone who does support of BlackBerry devices, I hate this feature.
I set everyone up via the web the first time, as its a complete PITA to have to explain to someone where to go on the handheld and then through the mobile browser for them to create a username and password just so I can log in via the web.
Also, in the exceptions listed above, should Outlook being Exchange? Kind of confusing for typical endi-users to say Outlook accounts can’t be added via the handheld.