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Enterprise mobile: on upgrading BlackBerry devices
10 April 2007 by Rod McLaren
From the mobile operator perspective, the enterprise handset market can seem like a rounding error – a mere subset of the consumer market. Operators and handset manufacturers therefore tend to develop and rollout services and handsets at the pacy frequency the consumer market demands.
Conversely, enterprises would often prefer to see handset development and iteration slowed in favour of rock-solid implementations and support from the operator/device manufacturers/application vendor axis.
We’re about to roll out a major revision to a public sector application that runs on the venerable BlackBerry 7730. To help with the rollout, our customer needed to invest in some extra devices, and given that 7730s are hard to get these days, we wanted to pick a device that laid on the likely handset upgrade path for this application. This was the thinking we ran through on which new device should run alongside the older ones:
- proven device since 2005-6.
- will be discontinued at some point as it gets replaced by 8800 and rumoured 8300, so there may arise a stockpiling challenge as it gets harder to find. Alternatively, business gets ready to embrace more deeply heterogenous device solutions.
- has same thumbwheel as 7730 (thus offering an interaction consistency to users)—it’s probably the last RIM handset to have that interaction mode.
- probably cheaper to buy than newer 8800? – completely depends on corporate deal with operator.
- not as physically robust as earlier handsets – eg 7730 – so may need additional robust casing in a hard-wear field environment.
- new in market early 2007, but not accepted by some operators yet, certainly not available in volume in the UK as at March 2007 (we’ve been testing a couple of devices for a few weeks: a review soon)
- has GPS, which could be useful for future mapping/locations services, though we haven’t tested how well the GPS works compared to dedicated devices and other solutions.
- has a trackball instead of thumbwheel (RIM looks like it is permanently retiring the thumbwheel in favour of a trackball that adds a horizontal axis of movement and can be used by left-handers).
- doesn’t have a camera. This will be seen as a management benefit for some organisations and situations, and a missing feature for others. The rumoured 8300 has a camera, and it will be interesting to see if there are many devices going forward that don’t have cameras.
- more expensive to buy than older 8700? – completely depends on corporate deal with operator.
- equally robust as 8700.
Other BlackBerry devices:
- 8200 Pearl – screen and keyboard are too small.
- 7730 – is end of life so very hard to buy now, and gradually becoming harder to get meaningful operator support for.
We didn’t look at non-BlackBerry devices on these grounds:
- primarily because they would have added either needless complexity operationally/IT management/IT support/retraining OR added cost to replace entire fleet of current devices.
- Additionally: data and device security, some development cost on the application side, and infrastructural cost.
- this is not to say that non-BlackBerry devices and platforms aren’t very good: actually they are, but in this case sticking with BlackBerry was a no-brainer because the operation and system works well enough, and changing it wasn’t justifiable.
We concluded that the 8700 was the device to get, given the characteristics of the project and customer.
What’s interesting is that the decision process and the devices under consideration could have been completely different had we been starting with a blank slate. The obvious learning is that technology choice for a project is determined more by the customer’s/project’s context than it is by top-down technology philosophy. Driving that context is often the question: “how simply and painlessly can we do this?”... but that’s topic for next time.
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