Unless you’ve been living in a cave you’ve probably seen something about the new Apple iPhone and probably heard something about it being a BlackBerry killer. In isolation the iPhone looks a pretty cool phone with its multi-touch and iPod functionality included. When you start to looking a the BlackBerry and what’s made it successful though the iPhone is lacking. First is security, the BlackBerry has a very strong and established security policy that has made easy to integrate into most corporate environments. Next
BlackBerry supports the BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Solution), the BES provides industry leading connectivity between wireless networks and the enterprise mail server. Rogers, Bell, Telus and maybe even FIDO all have high speed connections supporting the BES. The BES also builds on the BlackBerry security model by encrypting all traffic, again making it easy for enterprises to accept. And lastly the BlackBerry brings preferred data rates as a result of its connection between carriers and the BES. I don’t think the Research in Motion has much to worry about from the iPhone currently…
But can the BlackBerry take over the digital music space that Apple and the iPod currently own? Like the BES Apple has done a great job in developing supporting services into
iTunes. Any serious contended for the digital music space needs to take on iTunes, which huge artist, audio books and podcast and libraries. iTunes also make all these extremely easy to import onto the iPod. Microsoft and its Media Player are far more complicated than iTunes and really miss the simplicity of the process. Microsoft’s solution is also further complicated by digital licenses and rights management. Any vendor that wants to go after the digital music space will need to develop a replacement iTunes or partner with Apple.
As is often the case the success of a device is really dependent on the supporting infrastructure that’s available for it. The Microsoft Pocket PC platform and Palm devices suffered from similar problems where the devices were individually very powerful but lacked the supporting tools to really get mass adoption.