BIS 4.1 coming soon

BIS or BlackBerry internet service is the back bone of how BlackBerry’s are so good at what they do. This is how data is compressed by up to two thirds, how we get our email, instant messaging and apps. In other words without it our devices just send/receive SMS and make/receive calls.

Every now and again BIS is upgraded and we’re now approaching a major release. Many of these features will only be on offer to the latest crop of BlackBerry devices running OS7 which is a little disappointing but they’ve gotta get you to upgrade somehow. BIS 4.1 will see us able to receive email messages that are up to 11mb’s in size and also be able to download attachments in their original format that are up to 8mb’s in size.  These features are OS7 specific.

For the rest of the BlackBerry community when you add a new email account to BIS the last 20 emails on that account will be pushed to your device so at least you’ll have an idea of what’s been happening. Previously only new email would be pushed to your device once you added a new email account.

I’m also hoping to see an improvement in the marking of emails as read on the device when you’ve read them on Gmail on a computer. At the moment it can take as much as 3hrs for this to happen whereas reading an email on your device and waiting for it to be marked as read on your PC is almost instant with Gmail. Fingers crossed on that. It looks like the confirmed dates for the BIS 4.1 launch are Asia Pacific on Sept 10th, Europe on Sept 23rd and North America October 10th 2011.

More information from BlackBerry here: BIS 4.1 knowledge base