The latest news from Meantime IT

During the 18-monthly search for a new mobile handset, one of the team was informed by a high street mobile provider that her beloved Blackberry wasn’t being stocked by them anymore. A few frantic visits to other providers confirmed that most of the major mobile merchants would no longer be stocking RIM’s once ubiquitous device on the high street.

While our colleague may be mourning the loss of her beloved keyboard and coming to terms with a long, miserable future of poking a clumsy finger at an unresponsive screen, our developers are breathing a huge sigh of relief.

Blackberry handsets have long been a bugbear of anyone who sends emails created in HTML. The code doesn’t display properly on the BB screen unless it’s been specifically enabled by the handset owner, so for businesses that need to send an HTML email, when it comes to BB users there are three options: 1) accept it will always look terrible; 2) ask each individual user to enable HTML; 3) ask every recipient of your email if they own a Blackberry and then create a separate sub-list of users to send a plain text email to.

When people are already bombarded with requests to download apps and fill in surveys, we suspect they wouldn’t take kindly to the latter two. But neither do designers - particularly those as particular as ours - want to accept that their lovingly crafted communications will be displayed as a series of Wingdings.

The Blackberry won’t be disappearing altogether - the Canadian company appears to be simply making good on a commitment to focus on the business market - but it will become an awful lot easier to decipher who’s viewing your communications, and on what. And if you’re aiming at consumers, get happy with that HTML.