Content area
Full Text
We pick seven serious business phones -- with all the bells and whistles, plus the power and flexibility that real mobile professionals need. Part I: BlackBerry 8800 and Nokia E61i
The iPhone is wonderful for well-heeled consumers and status-conscious gadget freaks (see my review, "iPhone: The $1,975 iPod"), but business users need more... much more.
The iPhone also misses the mark with enterprises, which typically run their own wireless operations, wiring back-end services with custom handset software to create tailored solutions. Most enterprises standardize on a given handset that's compatible with their wireless solutions, then deploy a fleet of devices appropriately pre-configured for the company's applications and general IT services like e-mail and intranet.
So what makes a great enterprise handset? It must be highly configurable to match infrastructure and potentially to adapt to changes in geography or work assignment. It must accept custom client/server applications that may place unusually high storage, performance, and UI burdens on the device. It must be manageable from a central point within the business so that the enterprise is empowered to provision, revoke, reconfigure, blank, and alter usage and security policies without bringing the unit in from the field.
It's a tall order, but such devices exist, outside Cupertino. The BlackBerry 8800 and Nokia E61i, reviewed here, satisfy enterprise criteria more fully than any handsets before them, with each device showing markedly different strengths, some of which will surprise you. Tomorrow, I'll evaluate five other devices -- the BlackBerry 8300, HTC Advantage X7501, HTC Herald, HTC Hermes, and Nokia E65. Together, these seven represent the cream of the crop for enterprises, executives, and mobile professionals.
BlackBerry 8800 When Research In Motion (RIM) started out, there was one thing that its BlackBerry did well: Push messaging. Now that the BlackBerry 8800 is here, we have one handset that does push messaging, mobile phone, media playback, Java GUI, PDA, and GPS navigation equally well.
If you've never encountered one, BlackBerry is the prototypical big-screen-over-QWERTY-keyboard mobile device. Every BlackBerry comes with the capability to receive and send push messages, which contain e-mail, application data and management commands.
BlackBerry's uniqueness lies in distributed infrastructure that is located at wireless operators' facilities, at RIM's datacenters in Canada, and on BlackBerry Enterprise Server systems...