Table 8 Is Enough

This week the City of Miami sponsors a geekily prescient workshop at the Riverside Center on SW Second Avenue called "Mapping Your Community to Serve You Better," starring a team of National Geographic urban explorers demonstrating how a GIS (geographic information system) works. (The digital-imaging tool overlays natural and humanmade landscape elements such as buildings, streets, sewer systems, sea-level elevations, power grids, and waterfronts to create a survey of what's going on in a given area. The generated data is viewable and available on the fly — on screens as tiny as a cell phone's.)

Even more promising is Miami-Dade County's recently announced strategy to go "beyond e-mail" with the purchase of 600 wireless handhelds for its emergency services staff. Devised by Angel Petisco (who bears the cumbersome county title assistant director of technical services for the Enterprise Technology Services Department), the system — Onset's METAmessage software running on Research in Motion's BlackBerry hardware — will allow the county to exchange messages, documents, and other information with those in the network regardless of working e-mail infrastructures. In other words, if there's a communication-disrupting disaster, the wireless systems will still work.

"Miami-Dade got a dependable emergency communications solution up and running quickly," Eyran Blumberg, Onset's vice president of products, says. Had MDC blundered into a deal with Verizon Wireless, that would have rendered the PDA much less useful. Officials acknowledged, though declined to elaborate, that the county had terminated discussions over wireless services with Verizon in favor of the Onset system.

But private citizens who subscribe to Verizon Wireless services (it's Florida's largest cellular provider) have no such options. Verizon is the only SoFla provider to offer the latest BlackBerry hardware — the 8703 model — yet the company won't support RIM's nimble architecture; in fact Verizon blocks two of the BlackBerry's best functions: GPS and WAP Web pages launched through the Opera browser, which is specifically designed for handhelds. User-enabled GPS would provide clients not only with real-time navigation (similar to the automotive world's OnStar guidance system) but also with superspecific coordinates about the operator (and can be turned off with a wheel-click for those who wish to remain incognito). The Opera browser (which operates on every single wireless system except Verizon's) is a software patch that, finally, scales Web pages to a BlackBerry-screen-size aspect ratio, meaning it's finally practical to use the Internet from a handheld.

So what's Verizon's deal? Chuck Hamby, the company's Miami spokesman, knows. Kind of. Hamby actually had such an entertaining array of explanations that The Bitch sort of just wanted to let him yack on and on ...

"Well, you know, people these days can do crazy things with computers," Hamby said. "They kind of just slip in there and do things, and if they get into the network, there's no telling what could happen. We have to take every step to protect the integrity of our network."

(RIM's development director, Greg Wade, responded in a recent Web posting: "The BlackBerry platform is entirely secure and used by huge numbers of executives who have to have remote access to critical, confidential corporate data.")

The Bitch pressed Hamby for further information.

So the lack of support for GPS and Opera is a security issue? You mean one nutty Opera user could disable Verizon's entire Florida network?

"Well, it's not really that, though our engineers aren't really satisfied with the security they offer. Those systems would require a certain capability that doesn't exist today."

But they do exist! RIM made BlackBerry specifically to function with location-based networks!

"Well, the other concern is customers' privacy. We're trying to do as much as possible and do the right thing for as many customers as possible. We're going to err on the side of caution."

But people don't have to turn the GPS on if they don't want it.... What about Opera? There's a message on its homepage lambasting Verizon for not being compatible with the browser....

"We're working with Opera. That situation will be resolved ... soon. There's been a lot of dialogue about the Opera incompatibility."

So other people have complained about it, I guess. Why would Verizon lock down the new-model BlackBerry market and then disable some of its critical features?

"Well, a lot of people have complained about it. You're the first reporter who has complained about it, though.... As to the BlackBerry issue, we're working with RIM. The BlackBerry is a fabulous product that has existed for many years and serviced generations of customers...."

Um, maybe not generations.

Hamby denied that Verizon is stepping on RIM in the interest of driving commerce toward products sold exclusively by Verizon, such as LG's MP3 player/cell phone dubbed Chocolate, which was launched in the Miami market (and you don't need The Bitch to explain why this device is foundering).