Posted by The Blogging Desk on Fri, Jan 28, 2011
- by Eoin, "The Natural", Beck
PreCentral:
Consumer Maket Research Analyst and VP Research Director of Data at Forrester Reineke Reitsma provides an interesting report on the state of Enterprise support for mobile OSes in 2010. Citing the Enterprise and SMB Networks and Telecommunications Survey, which polled over 2000 enterprise executives in Europe and North America, Reitsma notes significant year-over-year changes in device support, going from nonexistant to 8% support for webOS, and an increase from 2% to 11% for Android. It’s also interesting to see that despite RIM’s utter dominance in this sector with 70% representation, there are still eight other OSes maintaining support, with five of them showing growth. And if you need more proof of just how different the enterprise market is, look no further than Windows Mobile, which maintained it’s 41% despite a palpable sense of stagnation in the consumer sector.
I also read an article about how Deutche Bank's pilot program to replace Blackberry with iPhones and iPad's has been successful. They're using Good as their email client. I use Good for my corporate email and it's an ok product on the iPhone but with no true multitasking, it's a little bit slow in opening up email. Also, it does alert on new email, but it only does a push notification message for meeting alerts (not email).
Good runs much better on Android, due to the support for background processes and better notifications. The downside to that is it's a battery hog. In fact, when I had an HTC Incredible, it killed the battery in a few hours because it wouldn't allow the phone to go into a sleep mode. I think Good fixed that bug in a later release but it highlights a bigger issue with Android in the enterprise. Because each manufacturer puts a software layer on top of Android (and in many cases the Carrier also includes a buch of crap ware you can't delete) there are way more potential sources for software bugs that can cripple the device. From my experience, the Android way is to have amazing functionality that starts out half baked and have the users be beta testers. To some extent, it's that way with all mobile OS's, but Android seems to be the worst at it.
Mark my words….If Good puts out a webOS client and HP puts out some compelling hardware and makes webOS a viable platform for mobile developers, webOS will soon be one of the top mobile OS's. In many ways it's the best mobile OS that I've used and it's one hell of a lot more polished than Android is right now and it's one of the easiest to develop for. Trigon strives to make sure its clients are using the best software possible in the mobile space, so be sure to contact us if you'd like us to help.
