Slashdot Log In
Smartphone Battle Is Shaping Up As RIM Vs. Apple
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Apr 27, 2008 05:19 PM
from the typing-on-glass dept.
from the typing-on-glass dept.
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.
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
The world is not the U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
MartRe: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
iPhone is like a luxury car. The Acura TSX (okay...not a Rolls Royce, I admit) does pretty much everything the Honda Civic does. But it's a more comfortable ride and if you're using it every day, that makes a big difference. A clunky interface is an inefficient interface = bad for work. Apple's iPhone GUI has no comptetitors at the moment. While GUI isn't everything,
Re:The world is not the U.S. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:The world is not the U.S. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Only 45 minutes with iPhone? *That's* the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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 qu
Re:The world is not the U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:The world is not the U.S. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I think the iPhone interface has a lot more potential, and should set the new standard. I think other business users are wondering why they can't have that quality iPhone interface - Blackberries fall short in terms of the information display corporate users often need.
I agree with your point about Apple being that rare company that could pull off a landslide - having a better mousetrap (or the appearance of one - no
Not entirely true (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The article specifically mentions Steve Jobs' worldwide ambitions in the opening paragraph.
So whether Slashdot is a US site or not is of no consequence here, the point still stands. Symbian is the dominant platform by considerable margin but still doesn't get a mention. Lazy journalism.
iphones (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, you could rightly ask how many different calendar apps or video players or hentai strip poker games someone really needs on a platform. I think the expectation is that the iPhone will be able to encompass more of the traditionally PDA-bound software that doesn't work so well on small s
Re: (Score:2)
I did notice a lot of people that bought iPhones had previously owned a standard phone. They were aware that things like a Treo existed, but never took the plunge. From my observation they use the email and web browser extensively.... not just the built-in iPod functionality.
For the record, i do know a lot of freelancers in a few different fields, so having constan
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You shouldn't compare programming in J2ME to the iPhone SDK, you should be using the Symbian API directly.
J2ME is for when you want your app to run on non-Symbian phones.
Dont forget... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not particularly a fan of Windows mobile, but it does the job well enough to make this a 3 horse race.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
New jobs (Score:5, Funny)
And how did Aple arrive at this number? (Score:3, Insightful)
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!!!"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm surprised the figure is so low - it means that 2/3rds of fortune 500 companies wouldn't even consider a trial.. and that's gotta hurt.
Re:And how did Aple arrive at this number? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it's from their quarterly earnings conference call last week. Apple reported that over one-third of the Fortune 500 has applied to Apple's iPhone 2.0 beta Enterprise program, along with over 400 higher-education institutions.
Parent
What RIM and Apple? (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I've never seen a RIM phone close up and even iphone doesn't seem to be that popular.. I've obviously seen one (I have one, and I sent 3 to australia for my boss and his friends), but it's telling when you're in the pub doing the very blokish thing of comparing phones (bluetoothing ringtones and pictures to each other.. alas I couldn't participate as I had an iphone, which of co
Re: (Score:2)
Quite happy with my HTC Titan (Score:3, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
WM 5 offers Push Email if Exchange server supports (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_TyTN_II [wikipedia.org]
It's unfortunately heavy but has an impressive processor, tons of memory, and comes with GPS.
Biasd and false (Score:4, Informative)
First let's look at the market share.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone [wikipedia.org]
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 [engadgetmobile.com] 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.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, because Wikipedia has always been known to be more accurate for this type of data than any other source.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Biasd and false (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Uh what? RIM and iPhone are small potatoes. (Score:2)
Blackberry is popular in North America but are practically unheard of in Asia and are just recently making strides in Europe. The iPhone has made an impact in new phone design, but Apple's still got a long way to go.
Different solutions for different applications (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Headline is BUNK (Score:2)
But only wiht AT&T (Score:4, Insightful)
You can get BB and Treo's for nearly all providers.
Re: (Score:2)
Java phones can work great but they suffer from a slow processor and low specs. I really recommend the Pantech Duo if you're looking for an upgraded phone that retains the standard dial pad.
Re: (Score:2)
Having a good web browser is kind of awesome for those random moments that you want to look something up. Honestly i will often borrow an iPhone before using the browser on my Treo650.... but i appreciate having one with me.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"Windows Mobile is #1 in usability."
(ROTFLMAO) How in the world did you manage to say that with a straight face?
"There are almost an infinite number of apps available for Symbian and Windows Mobile
Yeah, but how many file managers and
Re:Blackberry? WHO? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I bought the iPhone, and yes disappointed it didn't have 3G support, but this is a 1st gen product from Apple and I could forgive them for not having EVERYTHING they wanted to have for their 1st gen launch.
Was it they didn't want to deliver 3G? I doubt it.
I think it was time and moeny for development + possible licensing costs from AT&T and other carriers for the tech to use the network.
Makes sense to see if you