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.

The world is not the U.S.

[mvdwege (243851)]

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:

[furball (2853)]

What makes a smartphone suitable for business usage versus multimedia usage? What do business users need that's different than a non-business user?

Re:The world is not the U.S.

[Tony Hoyle (11698)]

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.

[gtx (204552)]

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.

Re:

[Nullav (1053766)]

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.

Re:The world is not the U.S.

[FishWithAHammer (957772)]

I'm not a fan of the iPhone, but typing on it is extremely easy.

Re:

[tabdelgawad (590061)]

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

Re:The world is not the U.S.

[LKM (227954)]

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?

Re:

[johnpaul191 (240105)]

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.

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

[KH2002 (547812)]

...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...

Not entirely true

[goldcd (587052)]

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 anoth

iphones

[perlchild (582235)]

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 (15122)]

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 (990887)]

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.

New jobs

[mistersooreams (811324)]

So, with this expansion in the market, there should be a whole lot more RIM jobs available. Err, and Apple jobs. Obviously.

And how did Aple arrive at this number?

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

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!!!"

Re:

[Tony Hoyle (11698)]

What they probably said was they'd consider trialling it, which is only fair. Give one or two employees them for a few days and if they come back to your office begging for their blackberries back you end the trial right there.

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?

[phillymjs (234426)]

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

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.

What RIM and Apple?

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

Quite happy with my HTC Titan

[Wrath0fb0b (302444)]

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 [wikipedia.org]

Biasd and false

[Coolhand2120 (1001761)]

Wow an article on /. with some misleading information! I'm so surprised.
First let's look at the market share.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone [wikipedia.org]

Symbian 65%
Windows Mobile 12%
RIM BlackBerry 11%
IPhone 7%
Linux 5%

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:Biasd and false

[DurendalMac (736637)]

Um, I use Safari, and if it gets a 3rd party cert it can't verify, then it will, by default, notify you and ask if you want to accept it or not. Second, the iPhone is a phone platform with a small percentage of the market, not an OS with over 90% of the market. On top of that, MS got their asses burned by threatening to cut off OEM licenses for anyone who tried to bundle Netscape with their computers. On top of THAT, back then a PC was about the only way you could browse the internet. Now you can do it on your phone, so there are other options and Apple is not trying to keep competitors out because competitors can easily set up browsers on many, many other devices. Try thinking about your argument before you splatter it on the screen.

Different solutions for different applications

[lohphat (521572)]

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) (316943)]

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 (204552)]

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.