[jeevessnsv]

Ok, so I was strongly interested in getting telnet/ssh on my 7280, for remote administration and for MOOing, and also for the sake of completeness (is there anything Blackberry *can't* do?). I tried Midpssh first, and I was disappointed. At least on the 7280, it's hardly even useable. I could connect to a couple of MOOs, but it was exceedingly slow, and occasionally dropped bytes I was sending. As for connecting to remote hosts for control purposes, the SSH negotiation takes several minutes, and then sometimes fails anyway. This is a known issue, as I read on the Midpssh site, but no one has found a fix yet. The client also defaults to SSH1, which is irritating, because many admins (myself included) have disabled SSH1 on their servers.

I installed MobileSSH earlier today, and it's vastly better. It's written specifically for the Blackberry, so that may be part of the advantage. Connecting to the same MOOs, it's much faster and more useable. It also defaults to line-based input in a sub-window, which is definitely the way to go on handhelds.

Idokorro has done some fine work here, and I plan to buy it next time I have some spare cash. I'm still not sure remote administration via SSH on a handheld is all that worthwhile, but I could see using it for restarting the occasional daemon or killing some runaway process.

PS I understand the concern about proprietary software for such a basic form of connectivity as telnet. However, the economics of software development work differently in the handheld market, because there are so many niches. If telnet/ssh on blackberry became hugely popular, with millions of users, then we could expect to see high-quality free implementations, but until then, a focused group of developers who craft a useful product is going to expect to be rewarded for their efforts in a more direct manner (i.e. with cash).