Back in late 2004, Samsung released a mobile phone with a 5MP camera to the Korean market. When asked why this same phone wasn’t released in the United States, Mike Goodman, then a Yankee Group senior analyst, said that people in the United States don’t use their mobile phones for much more than talking and for text messaging. “Video is far off. Online banking is very far off,” Goodman said.
How times have changed. BlackBerry has been providing push email and Web browsing for many enterprises for some time now, and according to research firm NPD, Apple’s iPhone 3G was the top-selling handset in the U.S. market during the third quarter of this year, outselling even Motorola’s seemingly ubiquitous RAZR.
Not surprisingly, more and more enterprise employees are using smartphones to do the work that laptops did only a few years ago. But unlike laptops, which are often issued by the organization, these employees typically want their iPhones, Sidekicks, and BlackBerrys to bridge the gap between personal life and business. It’s common to see an iPhone, for example, accessing an Exchange mail server while its user listens to music via iTunes.
However, it goes without saying that you probably aren’t comfortable with iTunes distributing applications to your iPhone-carrying employees, and you probably don’t want to have to allocate IT resources to support every latest and greatest device out there. So, short of banning these devices (and good luck telling your C-level executives that they can’t use the smartphone of their choice), what things can you do to handle the onslaught of all these smart devices?
Complete Article: Mobile Phones Invade The Enterprise: What Your Enterprise Needs To Know To Prepare For iPhones, Sidekicks & More
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