On the heels of last week’s news that Nokia is selling its E and N series devices through Dell’s Web site.
Today Nokia made its enterprise phones much more widely available.
Nokia is partnering with a number of distribution channels to push its Wi-Fi-enabled E61i and E65 to business users but this tactic won’t affect iPhone sales come Friday.
Some people will probably call this move by Nokia a counter punch to the Apple iPhone.
True, Nokia happens to be making this big enterprise announcement the very same week the iPhone is being released, but I don’t think the iPhone and Nokia’s E series devices are competitors.
The reason? The E series phones, based on Symbian S60, are smartphones. The iPhone is not a smartphone. It is not meant for enterprise users. Bring on the comments 
Apple may claim that it is a solid messaging device, that it syncs with your contacts databases and that it can view Microsoft Word and Excel files, but it doesn’t have near the enterprise integration capabilities that true smartphones offer.
It also doesn’t run third-party applications. The Safari-based “apps” that Steve Jobs said developers could create for the iPhone don’t count.
The iPhone may offer a fancy UI and other advanced interactivity, but in the end, most of the services it provides (Google Maps, music playback, video playback, SMS, mobile e-mail) are available on other, far-less-expensive feature phones.
Devices that use the Palm OS, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry OS and Symbian S60 are smartphones.
They all will run third-party applications to enhance user productivity, provide deeper levels of security and VPN access, as well as high levels of customization.
The iPhone is a locked platform and in theory, is no different from other locked platforms that are sold by the network operators.
This announcement from Nokia makes it clear who it is targeting: Enterprise users.
The E series phones all run the Symbian S60 smartphone platform, have Wi-Fi, offer access to push mobile e-mail services and back-end integration with Exchange. They are for business users.
I highly doubt that Apple is expecting any phone calls from IT managers at Company X looking to bulk order 100 iPhones for its sales force.
While prosumers may blur the line a little bit between consumer and enterprise users, in the end functionality will win out. I will be very curious to see how users of QWERTY-enabled smartphones, such as BlackBerrys, adapt to the keyboardless iPhone.
Even more so, I’d like to know how many will end up returning the iPhone because it doesn’t do what their BlackBerrys did.
Of course, I doubt all that many people lined up ahead of time to snag the new BlackBerry Curve when it was made available to AT&T customers last month. You can be sure that at least a few will do just that for the iPhone on Friday.
August 20th, 2008
1 Comment at "The iPhone Is Not A Smartphone, And Nokia Knows IT"
You know I would have to chime in here Sean! Ok, in response to you saying that the iPhone is not a smart phone, I agree. No, you can’t have 3rd party apps, and as far as I know, you can only sync up contacts with your [personal] computer and not some corporate database.
However, is the iPhone really aimed towards that? Is it being marketed as a business phone? Doesn’t seem like it to me, and I can totally see tons of Blackberry users returning iphones because it doesn’t do what their Blackberry’s do.
I don’t really think we will see this phone within a corporate environment. From what I’ve seen, Apple has never marketed their products towards the business world, though that doesn’t mean that business people can’t use them.
My point is that the iPhone isn’t necessarily trying to be the best smartphone on the block, but yet just a great phone period giving you the essentials that you need to be on the go and connected to the world…….with a great user experience.
This is kind of long, sorry, but just my 2 cents!
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