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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.
So, with this expansion in the market, there should be a whole lot more RIM jobs available. Err, and Apple jobs. Obviously.
apterous.org
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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In the European market both RIM and Apple are almost non-existent, I'd guess they got fraction of a percent together. Nokia is who got the smart phone market share here, along with some smaller companies, like Ericsson. After all, a smart phone without 0.5 Mbps+ internet connection, preferably flat fee, sucks when browsing "web 2.0" sites. That's something neither Apple or RIM delivers right now.
Yeah, it's a goofy name and it runs Windows Mobile but I've really taken a liking to it. EVDO kicks the shit out of EDGE (with RevA, I have clocked 1Mb/s) and built-in GPS is a real convenience. No push email, but you can have it query Exchange, IMAP or POP3 every 5 minutes if you like. The keyboard is also quite useful, IMO.
More important than the hardware, however, is the huge library of 3rd party software that is written for WinMo. I've never been unable to find an application that does what I want. Add to it the fact that it's pretty easy to jump in and write your own code (C++ or C#, your choice) and it adds up to a very appealing package.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Titan
First let's look at the market share.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone
Looks like TFA just picked a few from the bottom of the market share list for Q4 '07 and called them the new front runners!
Kinda hard to discount WM with %12, and with Nvidia's new processor for WM (yes it plays quake 3) for mobile phones it's a shoe in as an IPhone killer. Apple keeps locking up their platform more and more: no browsers, music players, applications that run in the background, all because apple doesn't want competition on their phone.
----Digression---
Didn't MS get sued for being a monopoly when it included a browser? Somthing you need if you want to get another browser or anything of the Internet (I guess you can use telnet). They didn't say "no browsers but ours" they just included it for free. Apple specifically states that you can't make a browser on their IPhone OS and everyone looks the other way? What a bunch of bias bullshit.----EODigression---
I think it's way to early to say what "two" big players are going to be left, at this point it's obvious it's not going to just two, there are 4 or 5 or more and I doubt the "big" one's are going to be Apple and RIM, Apple doesnt care a rats ass about security (Safari accepts invalid 3rd party certs 100% of the time, and don't get me started on the IPhone itself.), and RIM's idea of 'PUSH EMAIL' is: "buy this $5000 software from us to give your email server "RIM PUSH EMAIL" and god help you if their racket of a service fails, not to mention their complete lack of hardware innovation in the last decade. IMHO Apple and RIM seem like the least promising.
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.
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).
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.
...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...