Specific Advice - Berry or IPhone?

I will attempt at all costs to give you specific advice about a specific topic and recommended course of action. I think the general "Which direction should we be heading stuff" is interesting coffee shop talk but nothing that you can put in your hat and use day to day.

So, to kick it off: Blackberries vs. the Iphone

Features
While the feature parity between Microsoft, RIM, Apple and Google are fairly close in most regards, what you will actually use the device for and how you like to use it should weigh more in your decision making than anything else. There is no huge advantage to having Blackberries in the organzation anymore. Microsoft has developed push technology for their phones and Apple has leveraged it on their platform. If you don't use Exchange (all three of you out there), Google also has push technology.

The best part about all of these non-RIM options is they don't make your job as an IT organization more complex. They leverage existing infrastructure to get the job done. No extra servers, maintence or licensing is required.

But what about PIN to PIN messaging you say? I've never seen a use case for this now that Texting/SMS is so mainstream. You don't need it, move on.

Ease of use, user familiarityApple is #1 here, Google #2 and Microsoft #3. RIM is #857. For all you crackberry adicts out there, try this experiment. Take a Blackberry (pearl, 8800, etc.) and an Iphone and hand it to your Mother, Aunt, Uncle, non-tech friend, etc. Ask them to spend 60 seconds with each device and tell you which one they would prefer. I hate Apple as much as the next guy, but having used the IPhone for months even after the Google's G1 (which is close) I will never go back. Now if only they could make a PC experience that doesn't suck.

Administration
As previously mentioned, devices from non-RIM vendors do not require a seperate server to run. Did I mention a seperate application on top of that server? There are way too many things to manage these days. I don't need extra crap to manage - and neither do you.

Cost
I probably should have listed this first but honestly it is not a huge factor. Given our current economic environment everyone these days is trying to cut costs. I don't believe in the long run that any mobile platform will win on a cost basis. Competition is setting price thresholds and even Apple is now cutting prices. I can now buy a refurbed Iphone for the same as a new Berry. While some may balk at the required "unlimited data plan" of the Iphone, its common practice for IT groups to order these for heavy users to avoid high usage fees when they run over data limits - which can happen without the slightest warning. If anything the lower overhead of non-RIM competitors can affect this slightly depending on the size of your deployment.

Extensibility
When you think of applications on your phone who do you think of? Apple has commercials out touting its applications. While I'm still not sold on their very tight approach to managing app development I'm excited that so many developers haven't let it stop them from making great apps.

Google's Android marketplace is one or two steps behind now with most app developers making a port or someone just copying the functionality. Microsoft is rumored to have an app store coming soon, though I've yet to see a killer app on the platform.

Last but not least, RIM touts the business apps (like the SAP CRM partnership) that can allow business users to run apps on their phones instead of having to log into their laptops. I really don't think this will happen. They have missed the point. Its not about shrinking applications down to the phone. Its about making something that a mobile smartphone user would find interesting. Example: RIM/SAP's CRM app allows you to sync your CRM opportunities and makes notes on the account, etc. Interesting for sure, but its not going to get users to use CRM any more than they already do and likely if they want verbose call notes they will turn on the laptop and do it that way. Where is the integration into location based services? Look at the Bionic Eye app for the IPhone to see where this is headed.


My organization will soon be full of I-Love. How about yours?