Infoworld’s product review format in the 1990’s was famous. It consisted of a detailed and hard hitting qualitative review, accompanied by a grid rating the reviewed product on a number of different critieria. Finally a weighted average of those criteria scores produced a single numeric score. Many a company was made or ruined by that single number.
It’s back.
In Ultimate mobile deathmatch: iPhone vs. BlackBerry vs. Droid vs. Pre Infoworld ranks 6 smartphones on 7 criteria, and then weights the scores for personal use, small business use, and “regulated business” a.k.a. enterprise use. Perhaps unsurprisingly, iPhone 3GS wins the top rating, and tied for second place are Palm Pre and BlackBerry Bold.
BlackBerry bold smokes iPhone in Enterprise, while iPhone kills Bold for personal and small business use. Weak points for iPhone? Security, business connectivity, and voice capabilities. Weak points for Bold? The browser, app support, usability, and personal technologies (the media player and so on). What would the world look like, though, if RIM fixed the browser and had more applications available? It would be a neck and neck race. Hence the reason RIM recently bought TorchMobile and launched the $150 million Blackberry Fund.
Can RIM do it? Or will Apple fix their Enterprise holes faster? What do you think?
{ 2 comments }
