During the meanwhile ...
I still carry an eleven year old Nokia 5185.
Sometimes a telephone is just a telephone ...
Citing better application support, oilfield services giant Halliburton will be handing out iPhones in future - despite RIM's claims that its app developers have never had it so good. Halliburton is the latest in a long line of companies shifting away from the former default choice of RIM's BlackBerry infrastructure. For …
My 6YO palm died a few months back and I got the latest and greatest Verizon had to offer. NEW phone drops more calls in a day than the Palm dropped during its 6 years of use.
New pretty shiny thing cannot be used outside even if you shade the screen. Nice for checking email and browsing but those uses are secondary. Wish it could be a good phone first.
Actually, I'm serious and you've exactly made my point. Halliburton is a very button-down, all business, run by Bean Counters organization. They are not a technically advanced group, at least for things such as this. Their going from BB to iPhone is the equivalent of Ford going from Word to Google Docs. They don't make that change unless they have serious issues with the state of the BB or don't think RIM is going to be around much longer.
I could think of a lot of 'em:
- Porting BES to Linux, decouple it from the M$ stuff.
- Support other platforms besides LN/Domino and Exchange. Good is pwning 'em hard because of that!
- Fix the damn BB OS and put out decent specs on the damn things! The #1 cause of BB user rage is the clock o' death caused by shared mem going to 0. I'd expect RIM to just slap on 2G shared mem and call it a day but nooooo...
Google "Good", or "Bad" as our users call it if you want to see what an imploded RIM would look like. Good used to make hardware (like RIM years ago), obviously didn't find they could compete so went for a software only model.
A model which is horrendously bad. Want to know if you have any emails on a BB? Look at the notification icon. Want to do the same on a Good app? Unlock your phone, open the "Good" app, wait for it to connect and update (20 seconds later), and if there are any new emails, you will see them. No signal? Tough.
I won't go into all the other issues our users have with duplicate appointments, the app just stopping working, etc. Lets just say our users HATE it. And I don't blame them.
Oh, don't mention the UI either. Christ, whoever designed it managed to screw it up so badly that I can only assume they were either blind, or did it on purpose.
Only the insane, or masochistic would use it rather than a BB or the native iOS email client.
You're blinded by FUD. The iPhone will sync up with exchange by ActiveSync over https. it's as secure as you will get at the moment. It also makes it so that your phone doesn't actually have to talk to RIM and Haliburton has better control over it's email. Even better is that it doesn't have to worry about the Indian government.
Think they get around any lack of security in iOS by only allowing explicit access to the corporate network through an application such as 'Good'. This does mean the iOS email and calendar apps are pointless from a work perspective, and you can't access the intranet through Safari, but there are replacements for all these within the 'Good' app itself which stores data locally in an encrypted volume and only runs on devices that are not jail broken.
Satisfying a bunch of corporate users who want bling phones isn't necessarily good for business. RIM did have their little woopsie last year. But Apple are quite rubbish at software reliability, generally break at least one thing with every update and, as we've seen iOS 5, prone to making significant and unannounced API changes. Not exactly a good thing on which to bet business critical apps and functions.
Of course, Apple have managed to persuade people that they don't need things like battery life, good antenna performance and the ability to make phone calls reliably when moving. That's good PR but not good for end users. Apple may also succeed in convincing people and their businessess that they don't need reliable software or online/cloud services either. And that may indeed be fine, right up until your business is killed as a result of a really big cock up. Do you trust Apple not to have one of those?
Everybody's favorite security tyrants switching over to a less secure OS. Face it - some VP at that dump wanted to have that app that measures decibel sounds on his Blacberry but was unavailable. Or maybe they were sending their goons into some foreign land where that government made a deal to spy on anyone using Blackberries.
Having used a work's BlackBerry and personally having an iPhone (3, 3Gs and 4) and HTC (Desire HD and Sensation) my own personal preference is the HTC. But I've seen the writing on the wall for BB for quite some time. The BB handhelds just aren't good enough. They haven't kept up, their first itteration of touchscreen was TERRIBLE and the screen sizes are just not any use in comparison.
Someone earlier mentioned about shiny shiny and for a large part that's true; the decisions are made up top and on a golf course when some random exec sees his mate's new iPhone and gets told that you can use it for Enterprise now. I don't like the iPhone personally but given a choice between that and the BB it would be the Cupertino Kid every time.
And all that BS earlier about not being able to tell you have an email on Google btw, WHAT ARE YOU DRIBBLING ABOUT?? If you have a BB with no wireless access, guess what, you don't get email on that either. Remember you can choose between push or pull email.
I said at the start of this year that RIM would be dead by December and I stand by that prediction.
The reason is quite "simple" as to why Halliburton switched. After a long internal investigation, they concluded that Halliburton employees were spending hour after hour on their BlackBerries trying to find hundreds of thousands of useless apps; like the fart app. This caused the Deep Horizon rig explosion, so Halliburton has decided to make it easier for their employees to find those useless apps and allow them to get back to work quicker. So they moved to the iPhone.