A new report on Electronista says that smartphone makers in the US are having a tough time keeping up with demand. According to Tavis McCourt, an analyst at Morgan Keenan, AT&T has had issues keeping the Pearl in stores since March, and won’t be stocking the 8120 for home users until the 24th. BlackBerrys aren’t the only phones MIA: Apple has been having supply problems and Palm’s Treo 755p is reported to have been missing from Sprint stores for over two weeks. Of course, a lack of supply is vastly better than a lack of demand, but hopefully RIM will be able to ramp up manufacturing.
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Smartphone supplies running low
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Palm recently announced that they would be closing all their retails stores. While there was some initial confusion, it was eventually determined that only the seven stores located in malls would be closed. The remaining 26 airport stores are owned and operated by Airport Wireless which, until this closure, had a tight partnership with Palm. The stores will remain open, but the company is broadening their reach by adding new devices and accessories including, of course, the BlackBerry. While the company is in talks with Palm to continue having their devices in the stores, at the moment the decision is up in the air. RIM’s been starting to get more involved in the retail side of things, so this is the perfect opportunity to edge into Palm’s spot, especially considering Palm’s OS delay and 43% profit drop last year, and not to mention the whole Foleo debacle.
Josep recently posted some screenshots of the upcoming DataViz Documents to Go announced at Lotusphere. Documents to Go has been letting Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian users edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files for awhile now – about time it comes to BlackBerry, eh? After this first step, maybe we can look forward to wireless syncing to desktop documents sometime soon. Still, we can look forward to Documents to Go being bundled in with OS 4.5 due mid-’08.
RIM’s stock has been taking a bit of a dip lately due to worries of a recession in the US, causing Canaccord Adams to drop their target price from $145 to $110 and downgrading the stock to “hold” status. The stock saw a pretty nice jump after the last quarterly results, and cruised over $100 for awhile, but is cooling off at around $93 right now. RIM was far from alone, as Motorola, Nokia, Palm and Apple all saw declines recently as well.
Fellow Viigo partner, Jakajima, has recently published a white paper that aims to establish a system for objectively comparing smartphone OSes. “An innovative tool to benchmark Smartphone Operating Systems” puts a Nokia E61i, HTC S710, Blackberry 8800, Palm Treo 680, and a Sony Ericsson P990i device under the magnifying glass (the iPhone was released while testing was already underway, so couldn’t get in). The testing system is called the High Contrast Consumer Test, which involves getting first-time users to carry out real-world tasks in line with the smartphone’s specialties.
The testers are dubbed as “extreme”, in that they’re gunning for one particular kind of usage. By submitting smartphones to extreme users of various levels of knowledge, the HCCT is able to gage the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of using each OS. This is just a pilot project to set the groundwork, so we’ll have to sit tight until the labcoats have another go with the fully polished rubric. In the meantime, check out what are supposedly the top 24 smartphone features for professional users, in order of importance…
Continue reading ‘White paper experiments with smartphone OS comparison’
The handheld database manager, HanDBase, just got bumped up to version 4, with a few new bells and whistles, including Vista support. The UI has gotten a bit of a facelift, the OS X client now has searching and sorting functions (which seem pretty vital for database work), 5-way navigation for Palm and Windows Mobile, and a few other things. As ever, HanDBase syncs with Microsoft Access through a bundled utility, although it’s wired only. If you’ve got a boatload of information that you want to keep an eye on from your BlackBerry, you can pick HanDBase up for $39.95 over here.
Yeah, it sounds ridiculous, I know, but there are some companies that are putting iPhone before BlackBerry, such as German software developer SAP. Their latest mobile customer relationship management package will be coming out for iPhone before BlackBerry or Palm. It’s easy to fob this decision off as one company making a poor business decision, but the fact is RIM isn’t completely stone-walling Apple’s progress into the enterprise market. Even if Apple remains the underdog in enterprise mobility, not unlike its status in the computer market, they can still manage to nab a healthy slice of the pie. Nobody’s expecting BlackBerry to be ousted as Corporate King anytime soon, but there will be points where it’s rubbing shoulders with Apple. It’ll be interesting to see who else makes the switch as the iPhone settles in.
Apparently it’s true, according to a recent study from In-Stat. Over the next five years, the OS-based smartphone market is forecasted to make upwards of 30% growth each year (except Palm of course), leaving the standard cell growth rate in the single-digit realm. This boom for feature-rich mobiles is good news for carriers, who can expect to see an increase in average revenue per user who’s making use of all those fancy bells and whistles.
“Because of the value users are finding, organizations are slowly taking ownership of smartphones and data applications used for business purposes,” says Bill Hughes, In-Stat analyst. “Rather than having overcomplicated reimbursement plans, more organizations are finding it more expedient and economical to treat wireless voice and data services as a business expense when they use smartphones.”
The mobile learning software Learning Mobile Author by Hot Lava will be compatible on BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm and other devices as of their latest release. Their platform allows for quick content publishing to a broad group for on-the-fly job training, not unlike Mobile Chalk. The new version also features podcast support, which we could see as having some very handy applications. Need to issue daily updates to a scattered workforce? Hot Lava would let you podcast it out.
While the BlackBerry might still need some work against the iPhone, it’s still kicking tail against other smartphone manufacturers when it comes to keeping enterprise buyers happy. J.D. Power and Associates used a rating system which examined a smartphone’s ease of use, operating system, form factor, audio, battery and utilities, in order of weight. Palm and Samsung tied for second place, with Motorola behind the industry average. Outside of that, the survey also touched on some other trends among smartphone users, such as the 40% who wants GPS versus the mere 26% who want Wi-Fi. The top features folks are looking for in a smartphone are “personal information manager (PIM) functionality (50%), Internet capability (48%), Bluetooth capabilities (46%), general ease of use (44%) and overall design/style (44%).” Funniest thing is that games topped enterprise users’ choice for third-party software – all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, huh?
