Big Brains

What's the best business smartphone?

Take a look at what is on offer in the marketplace today.

BlackBerry Bold 9000(Credit: BlackBerry)

BlackBerry Bold 9000
Everything we've loved about BlackBerrys of old is present in the Bold (yes, including Brickbreaker), plus there's a couple of new tricks tossed in for good measure. The handset looks fantastic, though we could stand for it to be a tad slimmer, and some of BlackBerry's software needs further revision to make it as easy to use as the competition.

Editors' rating 8.5

Apple iPhone 3G(Credit: Apple)

Apple iPhone 3G
Despite all the hype about Apple's telephonic prodigy, the iPhone 3G actually stacks up poorly against the competition in terms of features and price. However, Apple's winning UI, overflowing apps store and sharp style still make the iPhone 3G a great offering.

Editors' rating 7.0

Palm Treo Pro(Credit: Palm)

Palm Treo Pro
If you like the iPhone look but lament its lack of a QWERTY keyboard, the Palm Treo Pro might be the phone for you. A fully featured business phone with excellent performance; it unfortunately suffers from poor battery life.

Editors' rating 7.8

Nokia E63(Credit: Nokia)

Nokia E63
Continuing the tradition of the E71, the Nokia E63 is the cheapest smartphone on the market. This solid Nokia includes most of the features of your average smartphone, at about half the price. But if you're after a fancy phone, look elsewhere.

Editors' rating 8.0

HTC Dream(Credit: HTC)

HTC Dream
Google's Android is awesome, but the Dream needs work. Parts of this handset are superb, but its lacklustre design and poor battery life hold it back significantly.

Editors' rating 7.0

Samsung INNOV8 (i8510)(Credit: Samsung)

Samsung INNOV8 (i8510)
The Samsung INNOV8 (i8510) remains the most fully featured smartphone on the market. You just won't find a phone with more bells and whistles. Standout features include an 8-megapixel camera and 16GB of internal storage, all at a reasonable price.

Editors' rating 8.8

Nokia E71(Credit: Nokia)

Nokia E71
With its combination of excellent features and performance, matched with sleek design and its affordable price tag, Nokia's E71 manages to outshine recently released smartphones as our business phone of choice.

Editors' rating 9.5

LG Prada KF900(Credit: LG)

LG Prada KF900
The LG Prada is proof positive that the touchscreen experience in mobile devices has improved in the past two years. The Prada is one of the most responsive and intuitive touchscreen experiences we've had so far in 2009; the menus are clear and easy to understand, and the transition between menus and apps is seamless. The AU$999 price tag may have some shoppers baulking, but if you're offered the Prada on a decent phone plan we can happily recommend it.

Editors' rating 8.6

Samsung UltraTouch (S8300)(Credit: Samsung)

Samsung UltraTouch (S8300)
The UltraTouch will get lost in the mix a bit: it's not a smartphone, but it costs as much as one; it looks like a business phone, but it lacks the business usability; plus it doesn't have an excellent touchscreen, which it really needs to be because there's not much else for it to hang its hat on.

Editors' rating 6.5

HP iPAQ Voice Messenger(Credit: HP)

HP iPAQ Voice Messenger
The iPAQ Voice Messenger is at best, mediocre. There's nothing here that HTC, BlackBerry or Apple don't already do better, and unless your company already has a great HP contract, it's hard to recommend.

Editors' rating 6.0

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Talkback 8 comments

    tell 'em the price son!! Anonymous -- 27/05/09

    Interesting & helpful article, but the key thing you overlook is the ongoing price!
    With Telstra a Blackberry is $59/month locked in to one user for a 2yr contract!
    A Treo iPhone etc is $10/month (150MB plan) that can be cancelled anytime.
    The other thing is that overseas roaming is a bit better with a Blackberry. Sometimes Treos etc need to be manually selected onto a particular network.
    Keyboard thing is a preference, but I think emails are significantly slower without one.
    I am an IT Manager with about 30+ Blackberries, 80+ HTCs & Treos, a couple of iPhones in our fleet..

    It's a generational thing... Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu) -- 29/05/09

    Yes, Blackberry's may still rule at senior exec level presently, but in my daughter's (private) school Year 9 class, ALL the cool kids have an iPhone. My daughter complains that her 120GB iTouch is so last-year! She NEEDS an iPhone! I try to remind her that in Year 7, they all HAD to have a pink Motorola Razor!

    Everytime she tells me that she NEEDS an Apple laptop, I find her the right app to download on her Ubuntu PC at home... so as a supporter of Open Source, I'd love to see the new Google Android HTC get some significant market share. The Apple App Store is as much a vendor lock-in (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in) as iTunes/iStore.

    But I suspect I will be losing the argument at home about an iPhone being an essential need for a 14yo. Teens listen to a lot more MP3s than execs... but when those Gen-Ys move into the workforce, they'll stay with a media-rich solution over something that syncs better to M$ Outlook (ie personal play over corporate fit).

    Apple's MP3 players have always been intentionally knobbled (no drag-n-drop of songs onto player etc - having to go via iTunes instead). iRiver and other MP3 players don't have those Apple restrictions... but you never hear any of the Apple-generation mentioning the problems. Their approach is that, as long as you fully-commit (immerse yourself) in entirely-proprietary Apple-only protocols, those problems go away. As long as you use ONLY iTunes to organise your music, the lack of drag-n-drop doesn't matter. As long as the only contacts database you use is the one on your Apple laptop/desktop, then it WILL sync perfectly with an iPhone.

    Apple is actually being remarkably successfully in converting its dominance in portable media players to the smart phone market. But with the entirely-proprietary approach, it will have the sort of (anti-competitive) 'control' over users that M$ used to have in business computing ('Stay purely within our lock-in technologies and we will always give you a migration path'... albeit to only further Apple-supplied products and services). It is plain scary to people like me who worry about national competition policy. But for the kids, if a device has 'cool factor' they're in. I suspect they'll need to fall off a cliff before they realise they're lemmings.

    And RIM has a lot of M$ lock-in as well Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu) -- 29/05/09 (in reply to #320139501)

    To be fair, I ought also point out that the Blackberry has a lot of Microsoft lock-in as well. If you're on a 'normal mobile phone' (eg Sony-Ericsson) and you send a 'contact' in your phone via SMS, the recipient can 'accept' the contact into their phone's contact database. But if you send a contact via SMS to someone with a Blackberry, they can see the SMS, but they can't auto-add that contact into their phone's contact database. RIM expect that contacts derive from syncing with M$ Outlook or some other corporate database, and are not things you get sent by other phone users.

    So in some ways, RIM is a lock-in for M$ computing software, in much the same way as an iPhone is a lock-in for Apple desktop software.

    The Android has the 'potential' to be neutral on these issues, providing 'open' connection with whatever other software, services, formats you use. However, it seems it will favour mobile email via Google, and Google Maps etc. As the 'third force' (what France called its military might), Google needs to offer users some measure of protection against lock-in by either M$ or Apple. And yes, implicit in that is the idea that Google are trying to encourage you to use their services, but arguably, there is far less 'lock-in' with Google mobile email, web-based maps etc than with M$ or Apple desktop OSs, apps and proprietary formats.

    not quite right bob -- 30/05/09 (in reply to #320139503)

    actually blackberry supports not only exchange, but lotus notes and novell groupware, which are entirely not anything to do with microsoft.

    Might as well just say that it supports a robust set of business network applications as thats more truthful.

    Point still stands, even with minor correction Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu) -- 09/06/09 (in reply to #320139869)

    Thanks for the additional information... I had forgotten that some corporates were still using Lotus Notes and Novell Groupware. Notes did introduce some novel functions when first released in the 1990s. But it was not designed as an email client. That was a tack-on function that came later. Last time I checked I remember being stunned to discover that Notes had more 'lock-in' than Microsoft, in that if you didn't continue paying annual licence fees, you seemed to lose all access to your older emails. Most archivists would shudder at such an approach. There may be some workarounds (other programs that will read the files etc) but I think later generations will laugh at the idea that anyone stored their emails into proprietary formats (including Outlook).

    Anyway, the point remains that organisations that deploy Notes or Groupware typically do so on an M$ platform (eg Mac users would be rare).

    And the 'proof' of this corporate-only focus is that you CANNOT receive a contact sent from an other phone via SMS directly into your Blackberry's contacts, whereas Nokia, Sony etc allow this. The Blackberry expects to be 'updated' only by PC linking (or you can re-key such contacts using the tiny keypad).... But to be more general, I should say 'corporate lock-in' rather than 'M$ lock-in'.

    cheers bob -- 11/06/09 (in reply to #320142275)

    thanks for replying so amiably to my anal contribution graeme. Corporate lock-in is a very fair term =)

    And Large Corp Deployments are a LAG indicator Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu) -- 01/06/09

    The article focused on a research company's noting of what results they'd found in surveys. But such data is always months behind the market (unless electronic data collection is used, such as with TV ratings).

    Secondly, the article focused on "large corporate deployments" yet this is a very serious 'lag' (not 'leading') indicator of trends. Individuals move with trends, rogue execs (those not prepared to keep with a corporate standard) are next, and well-planned corporate deployments come much later. The only thing they are ahead of is department-wide government upgrades!

    The third point I'd made is to observe who's advertising. At present in Australia no iPhone bundles are advertised on TV. Why? It's because the telcos are moving all they want to, without any promotion. Apple is reporting bumper sales of the iPhone, while telcos are subsidising/financing those sales. The iPhone competitive handsets are all being heavily advertised in the popular media. Why? Because they see that they need to address the run-away success of the iPhone, before they lose all market share in the smart phone segment.

    Fourth, the iPhone does not yet have broad channel support. Telstra, the largest telco offers what are essentially phone-only usage plans for the iPhone. That DOES greatly limit the appeal of the iPhone to the large number of Telstra mobile customers. Apple and Voda offer data packages... but they are not particularly competitive, as the telcos presumably do not want to be financing too many iPhone purchases. Finally, Three does not have access to the iPhone, and is not yet able to offer Voda packages to Three customers.

    Fifth, many know that you always gets bugs in the first version of anything. So a large number will only be pushed to purchase when their phone deals come up for reconsideration. If the v2 of the iPhone 3G is announced as soon as July (as some believe) then that may mark sufficient security for others to make the switch.

    I'm not saying the iPhone is the only answer in smart phones. But in the US, it is acknowledged as having the same 'big impact' as Apple's entry into the MP3 market. In 1979 the Apple ][ PC introduced an reasonable operating system and an 'open bus' allowing a whole industry to flourish with add-in cards etc, which were not possible/feasible with prior micro-computers. In 2008, with the iPhone+AppStore combo, Apple has managed to repeat this success. People who wanted to write specialist apps finally had a platform/opportunity to do so.

    iPhone 3G-S interest confirms 'cool' factor win Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu) -- 18/06/09 (in reply to #320140583)

    My earlier comment above about an impending v2 of the iPhone can now be updated now that the iPhone 3G-S is released.
    The number of apps available keeps growing. The telcos are offering tethering (use as laptop modem). Three will now offer Voda style iPhone bundle...
    Seems like the runaway success continues.
    In the same way that Apple's competitors in 1979 could not really understand why an open bus approach could win such market share, Nokia etc must still be scratching their heads thinking "What were we not giving the user?" But the issue is that any 'open' solution will end up addressing a whole bunch of niches that no corporate plan could ever address. Nokia thought it was heading off Apple by adding MP3 playing into Nokia phones, but Apple has taken full first-mover-advantage on the app-store initiative, and I can't see how Nokia's collection of apps, or Telstra's will ever match what is available from a large open marketplace. The best hope the others have is to get together all behind a truly 'open source' platform (Android?) and get developers to shift to an even-more-open arena, knowing that an app there will work on ANY phone longer-term. Nokia alone cannot defeat Apple, but only if all other phone manufacturers quickly get behind one 'more open' platform, they could re-level the playing field. I say this, but realise just how unlikely it is. Nokia etc would all like to own the apps market for their own phones, and replicate Apple's success. I think it will take them three years to realise that this was a flawed strategy. They need to all go 'open source' to now redress the clear lead taken by Apple.

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