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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.
And again U.S.-centric media act as if the U.S. market is representative for the whole world.
Here's a hint: RIM is only a player in push-mail smartphones. Worldwide, the major smartphone platform is Symbian. Apple may as well not exist in the world-wide market. I have seen a colleagues iPhone, and it is a nice little machine, but it is currently geared more for multimedia use than as a business smartphone. It will take Apple at least one more generation to actually become a threat to Symbians dominance of the marketplace.
Of course, compared to the other bit players in the marketplace, if one company can pull off a landslide shift in marketshare, it will be Apple. It helps that they understand Marketing extremely well.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
The iphone, warts and all, appears to be an actual platform. It's actually usable. Every blackberry owner I've seen so far sees it as a mail client, there are very few third party apps and they're not widely known.
The iphone will have third party apps(thanks to the controversy that it didn't) and people will know about them. I'd say that's a good reason to worry at RIM.
I'll miss my palm when my company gets to me, but I hope they replace the blackberries they have with iphones, not force the blackberries onto us.
HTC make plenty of excellent Smartphones. A lot of companies are giving their staff these Windows Mobile devices as they are cheap and have push email from an Exchange server.
Not particularly a fan of Windows mobile, but it does the job well enough to make this a 3 horse race.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
Most of their IT people -- those with real IT knowledge -- would be telling them "No, no. Bad plan. No internal central management, no internal patch management, doesn't fit our security model, bad, bad, bad!!!"
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I'm a 30 year old male, hardcore geek.. I have a "standard" mobile flip-phone with an unlimited data plan.. I can rapidly text without looking at it.. it plays music, takes pictures, bluetooth, play media files, can transfer data.. it does everything I'd ever want it to do. A few months ago, my employer got some of us Blackberries, and I still GREATLY prefer my old phone to the Blackberry. I keep fat fingering things, I can't text without devoting all of my attention to it, and the UI is just terrible. I for one, don't get the big deal. (And I used an Iphone once, and absolutely hated it. Real buttons are a requirement for me.)
The reason RIM has the business market is that they have features which mate it scalable for the enterprise, every other player hasn't matched features for that target market.
The ability to brick lost phones, encrypt contents, apply IT security profiles, provision remotely over the air, sync to the server to make the hand-held expendable, data modem for the laptop, etc. And there are apps for the BB for many major ERP and sales tools. The key business integrations for the road warrior are already there.
I think the iPhone et al are cool as a *personal* tool/toy but more often than not, they don't scale into a company where protection of IP and low TCO are mandated. For your personal use, you can absorb all the geekiness you want because the support required starts and ends with yourself.
Try to deploy 1000 iPhones in a company and you're going to hemorrhage money.
RIM isn't as sexy but it's a stable, known, scalable, and for the most part, secure solution.
Kinda hard to discount WM with %12
I dunno, seems pretty easy to me when it's been out for YEARS, and the ten month-old iPhone already has more than half its marketshare.
Blackberry... who?
... right. Blackberry has never, and will never, dominate any smartphone market whatsoever.
"For the last 10 years RIM has dominated the smartphone market"
Symbian is #1 in users, and Windows Mobile is #1 in usability. Blackberry is a closed system and will ultimately completely fail. So will the iPhone, by the way, aside from a personal(!!) gadget.
It's virtually impossible to develop anything for the Blackberry. Add to that thats it's features are insanely expensive compared to the alternatives. It's only somewhat big in the US. Sure nowadays you can get Blackberry in Europe, but seriously, who other than an easily duped executive would ever order it?
Your average Symbian or Windows Mobile device is way more compatible with existing infrastructure, costs a fraction of a Blackberry (with the latter mostly being insane subscription costs, at least over here).
But what is most important - customizibility. There are almost an infinite number of apps available for Symbian and Windows Mobile (and as a developer, and I hate to say it, Windows Mobile easily has my preference). Your company needs something not 100% the standard package? You just call somebody with the knowledge and get it tailored to your needs.
Virtually anything you want to do is possible. That's the power. Some times, it can also be a drawback, but usually it's a power.
As for the iPhone, same shit different day. It's closed (enough to be called closed). They want to exert control. You'll always be a step behind that way. Even if your interface is shiny, what can it actually do? Forgive me for laughing at everybody who ever bought an iPhone, but WTH, no 3G ? For what it's supposed to do as a device, it's somewhat comparable to buying a black and white flatscreen 42". It may mean nothing to a non-techy, but I'm sure we can all agree iPhone is not a business device.
I remember going to a conference once, about 3 years ago, here in Europe, where there was also a seminar on Blackberry. The spokespeople were very enthousiastic about it. Feature this, feature that. Most of the audience was completely unimpressed. Our phones already do that. RIM may have fooled you Americans, but they offer very little extra. They may have some extra technical management stuff, but all of that will be in the next WM (and probably Symbian, too) release, and they only have it at the cost of using the device how you want it to be used.
My biggest gripe with the iPhone is that it runs only on AT&T and I am not going to plunk down my cold, hard cash to buy an iPhone, just to hack it for other networks.
You can get BB and Treo's for nearly all providers.
I can make certs all day long on my own cert server and Safari will eat them up! Because the cert isn't issued from a ROOT CERTIFICATE PROVIDER, but rather issued by me, the cert is INVALID as far as confirming the identity of the host! Safari doesn't even have a list of root certificate providers! So in safari when it says "HTTPS" and the cert was issued by "CRACKS.AM" it will look the same as the "HTTPS" when its issued by verisign! Now if this goes over your head, maybe you should read up on it a bit, but don't tell me I'm wrong.
I love all these guys saying they "just got done setting xxx up for a client" and "iPhone suck 'cause it plays videos." I wonder since the iPhone is too easy for regular peeps to set up, you never get to see one, and see your job loss coming when your clients buy them.
...when I first tried the iPhone for around 45 minutes I was really not impressed [with the keyboard]. 45 minutes? That's the problem. It takes 2-3 days to get used to it. Those 2-3 days make a huge difference, and if you haven't spent that time, you won't know what the iPhone keyboard is capable of...From what I understand, RIM/Blackberry has end-to-end encryption. That is, from your mail server to your handheld unit. MitM is not possible with the blackberries.
On the other hand, taking the example of my Sony Ericsson P990i smartphone - it does everything that the BB does - push email, calendar sync etc. from our Exchange server - via Microsoft ActiveSync. Now, my understanding of this is that there are two encryptions involved - from the Exchange server to some box in my cellular provider's site; and then the usual GSM encryption between the provider and my handheld. That is, the provider gets to see my emails unencrypted.
This advantage has the potential to kill BB in India, at least. The goverment here has been tapping emails, phone calls etc. for years, and now they find that with BB, they are unable to do so. They have been trying to armtwist RIM to ensure that BBs in India use low-grade encryption (40-bit, IIRC). Google News for "blackberry India" should give you the whole background.
Now, apparently even the government of Canada has gotten involved, with the High Commissioner himself writing letters to India's DoT (Dept. of Telecommunications). I am wondering how this will eventually play out, but I believe RIM is even considering a complete pull-out of India.