RIM Uses The Cloud To Protect BlackBerry Devices

Research in Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry, is taking a page out of Apple’s book and giving users the ability to find their device on a map, back it up remotely, make it ring loudly, and even wipe it clean if worst comes to worst – all for free. But the so-called BlackBerry Protect, available now from BlackBerry App World, looks like it might even go a step further with deeper features. It’s not available to enterprise users yet, but here’s a preview of what business BlackBerry users can expect.

Again, part of the offering looks like Apple’s free Find My iPhone tool. From BlackBerry.com/Protect, users can set a password, find it on the aforementioned map, set a message for anyone who might find the phone, and make it ring loudly.

But the real differentiator here is the cloud backup feature. Users can set a schedule on which to have all their mail, contacts, calendars, memos, tasks, browser bookmarks, and texts backed up automatically. You can even have it set to only do so when you’re on a WiFi connection, and disable it while roaming, to save on data costs. And if you want to minimize the size of your backup, it can be set to incremental.

No doubt, that’s going to make a lot of BlackBerry users very happy. And I’m sure they’re still working out the bugs on the enterprise editions. But with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server the heart of many business’ mobility strategy, I’m sure there are a lot of impatient CIOs out there.

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