Which is the best smartphone for business?

• Tags:
• BlackBerry,
• Smartphone,
• IPhone

Suzanne Tindal ZDNet Australia

Published: 28 May 2009 12:15 BST

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ZDNet UK's sister site, ZDNet.com.au, talks to executives and analysts in Australia to find out which handsets are picking up speed and which are falling by the wayside.

It may come as a surprise to learn that in an organisation as large as the Royal Melbourne Institution of Technology's corporate environment, half the mobile phones used are Apple iPhones.

The university's executive director of information technology services Allan Morris, however, prefers the BlackBerry. "I've used BlackBerrys for several years. I find that for email, diary management, you can't beat them in terms of reliability," he tells ZDNet.com.au recently. "If you want something that's more of a business device, I certainly think that the BlackBerry's a win."

Morris currently uses a BlackBerry Bold, but has had no problems with other BlackBerry devices over the years he has been using them, though he is steering clear of the BlackBerry Storm due to some bad reviews it has received.

The IT director understands why people would opt for the iPhone — there are the apps, the iPod capability and the phone's marketing appeal — but he has an iPod Touch for those things. "Would I throw away my BlackBerry as a business device for an iPhone? No I wouldn't," he says, citing better battery life and ease of accessing emails among the reasons.

From an IT point of view, Morris finds it easier to hook up the BlackBerry phones, which he says takes only 10 minutes, though he admits this is because the university uses an email system for which the BlackBerry has a native interface, whereas the iPhone does not.

When asked about other devices, although he knew there were lots of options on the market, Morris says he does not have many people coming to him and asking to hook up alternatives. "Out of 10 requests we'd be lucky to get one that wasn't a BlackBerry or an iPhone," he says. Popular Nokia and Samsung phones were not mentioned.

In the midst of the global financial crisis, Blackberry maker Research In Motion (RIM) seems to be strengthening its hold on the business-smartphone market, ripping market share from competitors such as Nokia. Even the iPhone's glamour is unable to dent the company's success.

According to IDC data, RIM has been the only vendor to post a quarter-on-quarter increase in smartphone shipments every single quarter for over two years. In the first quarter of this year, it managed a 13.6 percent increase, a good performance considering the total market fell by 28 percent. Year on year, RIM grew 112.8 percent, compared to a year-on-year market growth of 26.5 percent.

Although Nokia still leads the overall smartphone market, with market share for the year sitting at 70.9 percent, this has dropped from 77.5 percent recorded in the fourth quarter of 2005. Meanwhile, RIM has risen from 5.6 percent of the market to 13.3 percent from 2005 to 2007.

According to Mark Novosel, IDC market analyst for telecommunications, the numbers show there is strong demand for BlackBerry devices in the corporate sector, but also reflect growing interest in the consumer market. RIM's consumer success was highlighted when Vodafone Australia thanked BlackBerry and the iPhone specifically for an increase in revenues in its recent results.

The iPhone has also enjoyed success in the market, selling 125,000 devices in its first three months in Australia.

Gaining business credibility
With analysts talking about consumers bringing their favourite devices into work and IT departments having to cater to their 'BYO' mentality, there has been some speculation that it might be the iPhone which could challenge BlackBerry's success in the business market.

Yet the device many have dubbed the 'Jesus phone' has suffered a slow path to business credibility. In 2007, just before the vaunted release of the 3G model, Gartner warned that it was not secure enough for business.

Gartner is able to give grudging approval, however, after a firmware update added essential features such as remote wiping and support for Microsoft Exchange push email. IDC's Novosel believes the iPhone is a "new kid on the block", and is in many ways unproven as a serious contender in the business sense. He points out that he has not heard of any major (that is, numbering in the thousands) corporate deployments of the phone.

Probably the largest publicised move in Australia has been that of Lion Nathan, which recently bought over 150 iPhones for its corporate fleet, as reported by The Australian.

Novosel's view is reflected in his numbers, which show that iPhone shipments are not yet making it into the top echelons of market share. With Nokia first and RIM second, Samsung comes in at third place, largely due to the popularity of the Omnia, according to Novosel, which is Windows Mobile-based. Yet when ZDNet.com.au called around among executives, it was the iPhone that featured...

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