In what may someday may be nicknamed the MacBerry, Information Appliance Associates (IAA) announced this week a product called PocketMac BlackBerry, a synchronization application that will give RIM BlackBerry users the ability to do two-way synching of Mac and RIM data.
Fourteen months in the making, according to Terence Goggin, IAA CTO, the first-ever synchronization solution between the two devices will even synchronize data with older serial-based BlackBerry model 957s.
PocketMac syncs with Entourage contacts, OS X address book contacts, Now Contact, and with Entourage, iCall, and Now calendars. Synching with Stickies Notes and Entourage Notes is also supported.
The application supports both USB and serial devices and synchronizes automatically when the device is placed in its cradle.
Password Protection
To keep corporate IT happy, PocketMac allows users to deploy password protection for access to data on the device, says Goggin.
"If you tell it, it will prompt for a password the same as a Windows system," Goggin says.
Goggin also says that PocketMac is a way around the problem of integrating Mac client applications in a mixed PC, Mac environment.
IAA is also working on a solution that will allow better integration with Mac e-mail. When available, the solution will allow users to grab sent messages from the BlackBerry folder and stick them in Entourage on the Mac.
"At the moment you can't pass a formatted bit of text to Entourage because nothing on the Mac has an API to do that," Goggin says.
PocketMac BlackBerry edition is available now and will retail for $29.95.
IAA also recently introduced PocketMac IPod that synchronizes PIM data from Outlook on Windows and Entourage on Mac to an IPod.
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