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

The world is not the U.S.

[mvdwege]

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

Re:The world is not the U.S.

[Tony Hoyle]

Security, ability to install bespoke applications, secure VPN, secure wireless, exchange integration, ability to dial out on multiple numbers...

Apple is trying to address some of these with firmware 2.0 but there's one key that businesses look for - the ability to negotiate very competative deals with the providers because they can play them off one another and get much lower than the published prices (one place I was at the mere threat of going elsewhere usually got them insanely good deals - that was a big contract). Apple has yet to address this, as there is currently nowhere else to go, and iphone is a monoculture.. if you port your apps to it you're stuck with it.

Re:The world is not the U.S.

[LKM]

Basically, I can't type on the iPhone in portrait mode. In landscape, I can usually peck my way using index fingers, either one handed holding the phone in the other hand, or two handed if a lay the phone on a surface. Typing with thumbs (the preferred method of all bberry users) is simply not possible. I find that hard to believe. Do you attempt to spell correctly at first attempt, or do you use the iPhone's auto-correction? I have large hands, too, and while the iPhone often gets single letters wrong, it typically manages to figure out the word I was trying to write anyways. Perhaps you should try to stop worry about single wrong letters?

iphones

[perlchild]

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.

Re:iphones

[NMerriam]

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.

I think that's the key to the "battle". While RIM and Symbian are powerhouses from a corporate standpoint, they've never had the crossover attraction that Palm had and WinCE has to a lesser degree -- lots of useful third-party apps that make you want to carry it with you in your personal life, not just when your job tells you to.

Dont forget...

[gigne]

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.

And how did Aple arrive at this number?

[morgan_greywolf]

Yet Apple executives have said that one-third of Fortune 500 companies were interested in giving iPhones â" with all their known and potential security holes â" to their employees. My guess is that someone at Apple is either pulling this out of their arse, or it's from some sort of survey of Fortune 500 executives -- most of which, even the Cx0s (where x is in [IT]) -- have very little knowledge of IT in general.

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!!!"

Different solutions for different applications

[lohphat]

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.

But only wiht AT&T

[hal9000(jr)]

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.

Re:Blackberry? WHO?

[gtx]

Blackberry has 11% of the global market even though 3/4 of its users are in North America. Windows Mobile has 12% of the global market and its users are fucking everywhere.

As a result, Blackberry dominates the North American smartphone market.

You may find this to be in direct conflict to your statement "Blackberry has never, and will never, dominate any smartphone market whatsoever."

Your post is a whole bunch of nonsense. Yes, Symbian has market dominance outside of North America. However, even by your own admission, "They may have some extra technical management stuff, but all of that will be in the next WM (and probably Symbian, too) release"

Have you ever considered that the cost of using Blackberry is worth it to some companies so that they can have these features right now on hardware that isn't a goddamned toy?

So please spare us your elitist bullshit. I don't give a good goddamn if you're from Europe or if you have the best smartphones over there. This doesn't make any difference if you don't have any goddamned clue what you're talking about.

Only 45 minutes with iPhone? *That's* the problem

[KH2002]

...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...