Will the BlackBerry meet its match in 2008?
Published: 13 Feb 2008 15:53 GMT
…improved battery life and MHz performance of Intel's chips, he said he believes the chipmaker has got the form factor wrong.
"I am sceptical about the mobile internet device," Simpson said. "There have been many attempts to come up with a device that weighs less than a kilogram but has the functionality of a laptop. At Gartner, we call it 'the one kilogram wasteland'."
"The MID is primarily useful as an input device," Simpson continued. "It is about taking a Windows desktop experience down to a small device. But is that the way people want to interact on a mobile? I don't think so. You don't tend to input much at all in terms of word processing or spreadsheets and the like when you are standing up. You sit down. And, if you are sitting down, then an ultra-light laptop will still be a better option."
Paul Osmond, regional director for RIM, said the company doesn't see the MID form factor as any kind of threat to the BlackBerry.
"Anything that makes you stop doing what you are doing isn't ideal. There shouldn't be a reason to keep walking and talking and doing what you are doing," said Osmond.
The smartphone
It's for the reason of pure mobility that Simpson said he expects the BlackBerry killer to come not necessarily from devices aimed squarely at the corporate market but from those moving into the corporate world from the hands of consumers.
"The interesting new things in the enterprise have all come from the consumer-device world — and the consumer world is driven primarily by mobile phones," Simpson said. "Smartphones are going ahead in leaps and bounds. They are designing ways to get things done on a small screen. The innovation will be around the user interface."
There is no better example, of course, than the much-hyped Apple iPhone.
Built for the consumer market, the iPhone comes with a bundle of applications focused on user-generated content and context-aware computing. The real innovation in terms of the iPhone is its unique user interface — a mix of touchscreen and motion-sensor technologies.
Simpson said that Apple is finding success by winning the hearts of professionals that buy a device for its consumer appeal, but later find it practical for business use.
"GPS and location-based services — that's a hint of where the next killer device might come from," Simpson said. "It won't be designed for corporate use but consumer use. Companies that make a device relevant and useful to consumers will win."
Appealing as it is, it won't necessarily be the iPhone either, but any number of devices that boast sleek design, touchscreens, long battery life and an open platform for application development. It has already been suggested, for example, that the iPhone is too expensive to roll out across the enterprise.
The BlackBerry killer might just as easily come from a traditional mobile-handset manufacturer. Depending on your definition of what constitutes a smartphone — the subject of some debate — it might well be a Nokia or Motorola device that knocks RIM off the top spot.
If you include the smartphone (many of which have some form of email functionality) in the same pool of sales data as the cellular PDA, you start getting a different picture altogether. Then, Nokia holds 48.7 percent of the market, compared to RIM's 10 percent.
Considering its familiar user interface, Nokia may yet come up with a BlackBerry killer. Nokia's strategy — one it has pursued very successfully to date — is to attack the market just below the executives and their expensive BlackBerry devices, releasing products with both consumer and basic business features.
The ecosystem is paramount
Osmond expects that IT administrators won't have a bit of it.
"The BlackBerry itself is just a device — but everything that goes with it is what makes it valuable," Osmond said. "The amount of effort we make in the back-end systems, in the three support centres around the globe providing 24-hour support, is phenomenal. RIM makes it all look so straightforward, and that gives a lot of comfort to the [corporate customer]. That's something we are yet to see from anyone else in the industry."
Osmond strongly disagreed with the assertion that the next big corporate gadget will come from the consumer world.
"Consumers may well be pushing for better features but, in the enterprise space, it's all about control," Osmond said. "Administrators don't care about features or how the device looks; they care about control."
"The iPhone is good as a consumer device," Osmond added, "but whether Apple and its third-party partners are willing to put the effort in to make it a workable corporate tool remains to be seen. It certainly isn't today."
Credit: Is 2008 the year of the Blackberry-killer? from ZDNet Australia
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