Another Smartphone operating system was announced in October. Windows Phone 7 has been added to the universe of Smartphones where the planets Android, Blackberry, and iPhone (or iOS) already circle. Let's look at the various Smartphone options and discuss the pros and cons of each and the benefits to the enterprise.
Let's start with the benefits of Smartphones. Email and calendar access is probably the number one benefit by far. Your employees can access both anywhere, anytime. They can be alerted to critical situations and respond to them. Web access is also a benefit, including access to web-based applications. Documents can be reviewed and notes can be taken. Finally, there is also a benefit in having access to podcasts that may be important or educational. On top of all of these are the applications: business calculators, business card readers, business news, expense tracking, and even CRM applications including Salesforce.
While Windows Phone 7 will be offered on a number of handsets in the near future, it's still too new to be considered for a number of reasons: it's lacking features needed by businesses; it's not yet a good long-term bet (consider Microsoft's other phone products which never had any level of success, the latest (Kin phone) being, for the most part, dropped, a few months after introduction, as well as the short lived Palm Pre). In trying to appeal to the broad consumer market, the Windows Phone may be missing necessary features (multi-tasking, copy/paste) for business users
Android phones are taking over the consumer marketplace but they lack consistency among carriers (from a software standpoint), and have limited business applications and questionable security. That leaves the iPhone 4 and various models of the Blackberry phone as the only viable choices.
Let's review the winners in various categories:
Security - Blackberry, followed by iPhone; none of the rest met the business requirement
Reliability- iPhone followed by Blackberry which has had several wide spread outages in the past twelve months
Future development - iPhone consistently provides new features on a single very advanced platform; has the most developers
Personal Choice - research by JD Powers shows business users pick the iPhone first; while large IT groups favor the Blackberry
Carrier Choice - Blackberry, for the moment; if the iPhone appears on Verizon in 2011 the playing field will be leveled
You have two choices with regards to Smartphones for employees: Provide or permit. Provide means you provide the phone, you own the phone, you pay for the phone and (hopefully) you control the phone. For large organizations Blackberrys may be preferred by IT but in any situation where you own the phone you will have to worry about phone management. Security can be more carefully monitored if you own the phone, but there is still going to be some risk. For smaller companies permitting employees use their phones for business is not a bad choice. In this case though you may want to limit the amount of corporate data stored on the phone. Applications including email can be set up to limit how much is stored on the phone and you can encourage best practices. The discussion of managing Smartphones is a much longer discussion.
The iPhone also benefits from the existence of the iPad which is a real potential game changer as a business device, replacing in some cases note/netbooks since they share the same interface and operating system. Do not read too much into Blackberry's recent tablet announcement - they didn't have a real one to show, or a price, or a release date. Compare that to Apple's typical announcements which have all three. There is a bonafide benefit to the single universe that Apple creates with the iPhone and iPad. It's extremely easy to use, it has every app you'll need, there are developers who will custom develop apps for you, and it just works. The hardware is solid, the software is solid, and they work perfectly together.
The Blackberry is solid. It's a business phone from ground up with the security you need. If your people want/need a real keyboard it's your first choice. However RIM may have taken a wrong turn in trying to win the consumer market and has tried to produce iPhone like devices (the Storm for one). Blackberry lacks in the application-development area and has fallen behind as Apple has consistently upgraded its hardware platform and its software.
So Smartphones have real value for almost every manager in an organization and knowledge-based workers or those who need to be in constant contact such as sales people. You can find valuable applications in addition to strong email and calendar solutions that link to your corporate systems. Right now carrier and coverage may dictate choosing Blackberry, but look for that to change in early 2011.
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