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.

[gtx]

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.