The Smartphone
It's for this reason -- pure mobility -- that Simpson does expects the crackberry-killer to not necessarily come from devices aimed squarely at the corporate market but from those moving into the corporate world from the hands of consumers.
"The interesting new things in the enterprise have all come from the consumer device world -- and the consumer world is driven primarily by mobile phones," he said. "Smartphones are going ahead in leaps and bounds. They are designing ways to get things done on a small screen. The innovation will be around the user interface."
There is no better example, of course, than the much-hyped Apple iPhone.
Built for the consumer market, the iPhone comes with a bundle of applications focused on user-generated content and context-aware computing. The real innovation behind the iPhone is its unique user interface -- a mix of touchscreen and motion sensor technologies.
Simpson says what Apple is doing right, and what Google is planning to do next with its planned open source phone, is winning the hearts of the "pro-sumer" -- the professional that buys a device for its consumer appeal, but later finds it practical for business use.
"GPS and location-based services, that's a hint of where the next killer device might come from," Simpson says. "It won't be designed for corporate use, but consumer use. Companies that make a device relevant and useful to consumers will win."
Appealing as it is, it won't necessarily be the iPhone either -- but any number of devices that boast sleek design, touchscreens, long battery life and an open platform for application development. It has already been suggested, for example, that the iPhone is too expensive to roll out across the enterprise.
The BlackBerry killer might just as easily come from a traditional mobile handset manufacturer. Depending on your definition of what constitutes a smartphone, the subject of some debate, it might well be a Nokia or a Motorola that knocks RIM off its perch.
Include the smartphone (many of which have some form of e-mail functionality) in the same pool of sales data as the cellular PDA, and you start getting a different picture altogether. Nokia holds 48.7 percent of the market compared to RIM's 10 percent.
Considering its familiar user interface, Nokia may yet come up with a BlackBerry-killer. Nokia's strategy, one it has pursued very successfully to date, is to attack the market just below the executives and their expensive BlackBerry's, releasing devices with both consumer features and basic business smarts.
"It's all about the ecosystem"
Osmond expects that IT administrators won't have a bar of it.
"The BlackBerry itself is just a device -- but everything that goes with it is what makes it valuable," he said. "The amount of effort we make in the backend systems, in the three support centres around the globe providing 24 hour support, is phenomenal. RIM makes it all look so straightforward, and that gives a lot of comfort to the [corporate customer]. That's something we are yet to see from anyone else in the industry."
He strongly disagrees with the assertion that the next big corporate gadget will come from the consumer world.
"Consumers may well be pushing for better features, but in the enterprise space it's all about control," he said. "Administrators don't care about features or how the device looks, they care about control."
"The iPhone is good as a consumer device," he said. "But whether Apple and its third party partners are willing to put the effort in to make it a workable corporate tool remains to be seen. It certainly isn't today."
can kill Blackberry - but only if it comes out in 3G