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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.
What makes a smartphone suitable for business usage versus multimedia usage? What do business users need that's different than a non-business user?
It's a pain in the ass, at least as far as typing is concerned. I always find myself typing much slower when there's no tactile feedback to tell me I'm actually hitting keys. (I hate those laser keyboards.) If the iPhone just had a nice slide-out keyboard somewhere, almost all of my gripes with the iPhone would fade away.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Typing on the iPhone is only easy if you have fingers the size of toothpicks and even then only in comparison to a multitap style input. If you've ever used a decent QWERTYboard or even learned to type well on T9 you know both systems blow it out of the water.
Base 13 FTW!
Not sure what smartphone keypad you are talking about. I find the iPhone easier to type on that my Treo.... and i own a Treo.
"The iphone, warts and all, appears to be an actual platform. It's actually usable."
... it's good for programmers, good for users, not necessarily tied to any cellular protocol (ie, iPod Touch), and they aren't in the app business to suck everyone dry. While it might be a smidge ahead of its time in the US due to our sucky wireless coverage, a good platform would likely find a nice home in the worldwide market.
More importantly, it's OS is based on the same code as Mac OSX. In other words, it's actually _programmable_ as well as usable.
This is a huge plus over Symbian, where everyone I've talked to who's tried to program with J2ME says it's the worst platform they've ever used. I know it's anecdotal evidence from my little corner of the academic world... but if you take a look at Apple's march SDK event where they had several companies present usable apps after having had the SDK for less than a handful of days, you have to agree that Apple's got something good going.
And that's even before you consider the financial aspect... the simple, flat $100+30% scheme Apple has just leaves the astoundingly ridiculous signing costs and requirements for Symbian & J2ME in the dust.
Apple is doing everything they can to set up a *platform*
PS Has anyone else realized that the ha-ha-look-at-the-silly-apple-and-their-iphone attitude all the Symbian and RIM folks have is scarily similar to the one that all the creative folks had 6 years ago?
Recent versions of Windows mobile support push from your exchange server - and once it's got a reasonable UI stuck over the top of the god-awful defaults - it makes quite a nice phone. Reason Blackberries have taken off is that they're well and truly owned by the employer. I can't a VPN token out of my employers for love nor money for my phone. They like Blackberries and if I want my email on the go, that's what I get. They give me a stitched up Blackberry (I can't fiddle with the settings to even add another email account) and it wil securely give me my office mail and that's about it. In fact that's the reason I think they've done so well, it's an appliance first and foremost (not a new toy I'd actually want - like an iphone).
I have extremely meaty thumbs, yet the FIRST time I picked up an iPhone I was typing away at 30-40 wpm while two-thumbing it.
Admittedly I'm a fast typer normally (fast enough at least, at 80+), so am not hesitant in general, and I knew some of the shortcuts (like how to put a single punctuation mark in without having to tap-switch between the screens twice), but that doesn't change the fact that with no practice, trust in the auto-correction, and a hand completely "non-built" for it, I was moving along quite speedily.
There is certainly room to improve, and most CERTAINLY configuration options Apple has to make available to actually deserve the "software keys++" marketing points they liked to promote, but it's starting on extremely solid ground, and I think will be plenty fast enough for almost anyone once they get used to it.
Not sure how in the way fingernails get, though...
My wife has an iPhone and I have a blackberry, so I speak from experience:
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. FWIW I have average size fingers (I think!).
The iPhone is a wonderful piece of technology. It's easier to do almost everything on it except for the one thing that's essential for business use: type emails. As much as I'd love for my work to give me one for free, they'd have a revolt on their hands if they took away the blackberries.
The iPhone will be a blackberry killer only when you can slide up the touch screen up to reveal a tactile keyboard. With Jobs' aversion to buttons, I don't see that happening any time soon!
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
I personally don't give a fuck about ringtones or cameras or the ability to play mp3s/videos/games on my phone. At all. My priorities, as a business-centric phone user, are in this order:
1) Phone calls
2) Email
3) Web-browser (and that's expendable, I just like to be able to google things on the road.)
Everything else is pretty much useless to me, whereas I can see where 17 year old girls want their phones to be toys more than anything else. Sure, my phone (blackberry 8830) doesn't have a camera on it, but damn if it doesn't have stable firmware which is made to do exactly what I want it to do with amazing consistency.
Fuck multimedia. All I want is something to handle my email without a hiccup.
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears