Smartphone Battle Is Shaping Up As RIM Vs. Apple

TeknoFin notes a piece in the NYTimes on the fight RIM finds itself in as the smartphone market shifts to a consumer focus, impelled by the iPhone. For the last 10 years RIM has dominated a smartphone market consisting mainly of email-obsessed corporate professionals. Analysts wonder if RIM can hold on to their lead as their strengths — such as cozy relations with cell carriers worldwide — are diluted by new entrants Apple and Google, who are "vocally trying to dislodge the carriers from the nexus of the North American wireless market." One of RIM's strengths in the corporate market has been their security. Yet Apple executives have said that one-third of Fortune 500 companies were interested in giving iPhones — with all their known and potential security holes — to their employees.

Comments

Re:The world is not the U.S.

[The End Of Days]

Or possibly, just possibly, this is a story about the US market and your world-view whining is completely misplaced. If you want only international news, you'd be best served to stop coming to a US site for it.

Battle over!

[sc0ob5]

Apple are no contention for anything related to phones. Apple are only a contender where the market is two or more years behind the times. Lets face it you couldn't even send an MMS until recently, no flash support, no 3g/3.5g/4g (if you say that doesn't matter you have obviously never used any of them), no keypad, no user replaceable battery (this has got to be a MAJOR problem for exec's who can't be without their phone). Really, if you think that the iphone is anything more than a glorified ipod then you need your head examined.

As for RIM, the cost of the servers required for these makes it virtually cost restrictive for most organisations to deploy for limited number of users that may use the phones.

Windows however is relativity cheap if you already have exchange for email/calendar/contacts, although I'm not a fan of the interface, the memory hogging and the constant crashing (i am saying this only having used WM5 on an i-mate jam and HP h5000 and HP hw6950) but availability of these phones is high and there is enough selection for anyone to pick what they want in a phone whether it be the keypad or touchpad, GPS, CDMA/GSM, etc. There is also a lot of applications.

Symbian is my personal favourite though as the interface is easy enough for anyone to use, POP and IMAP are supported, depending on the model of phone you may have the option for the blackberry enabled version. Has the same large range of phones like windows. There isn't as many apps as WM but I have been able to find everything that I need. For me there is no contest.