One of the more incredulous things to be postulated in the wake of the announcement of the iPhone 3G was this tidbit from CNet columnist Don Reisinger:
And although the BlackBerry has led the way, Steve Jobs just dealt a decisive blow that will not only force RIM to capitulate, but could see the end of the BlackBerry line altogether.
Um, say what? That sounds like the delusions of an Apple fanboy to the extreme. Let’s think this through logically.
First of all, there are a lot of companies that have made significant investment in BlackBerry technology, having purchased hundreds (if not thousands) of devices, lines of service for all of those devices, BES licensing, and all of the infrastructure that goes with all of that. If there is one truism about large corporations, it’s that they don’t take to change well. Switching from a BlackBerry to iPhone platform means huge changes to be made, and that also means a very large expenditure of money would have to be laid out for new devices, new lines of service, cancellation fees for existing lines of service, etc. If your existing platform isn’t broken, how do you go about proposing to the folks who sign the checks that you want to lay out hundreds of thousands of dollars for this new technology? It’s a hard sell, especially in today’s economy.
Secondly, while Apple is proposing their new ability to have applications on the iPhone, the delivery mechanism won’t work for most business. While there is over-the-air downloading via the new App store for personal apps and games and the like, enterprise level apps can only be installed via iTunes. Did anyone bother to tell Apple that iTunes is probably application non grata #1 for most corporate IT departments? This isn’t like the BES, which has the ability to push apps wirelessly from within the environment, or the packaging of apps in a binary format that both BlackBerry and Windows Mobile environments use?
Lastly, and this is probably more of a personal gripe, the on screen typing thing for the iPhone seems useless to me to do more than real quick SMS messaging or entering a URL, etc. Once you start working with a BlackBerry keyboard, you realize it’s not that hard to thumb out an essay on the BlackBerry keyboard. Hell, I can even putter away quite quickly on my Pearl’s compressed keyboard using SureType. How in the hell are people who are relying on one of these devices to do super heavy email loads going to last with that touch screen keyboard? I think not.
Thirdly, while they’re not on the same level with the user experience, give RIM credit for trying to beef up consumer level features on the BlackBerry. Any recent BB can play music now, and the forthcoming BlackBerry Bold is really amping up multimedia features and ease of use. No, it won’t kill the iPhone, but it’s a convincing piece of equipment anyway.
All in all, the iPhone remains a top notch consumer device. It does what it does extremely well. I won’t switch to it because of the carrier that’s involved, but that’s just my thing. When you put it all together, though, I don’t think we’re looking at a BlackBerry killer. Not in the least bit at all.
