Morning guys,
I've been tasked with reviewing the mobile phone situation at work as our contract is coming towards its end. We are a smallish company, with 20 users that have mobiles. 7 of these are blackberrys, the other 13 are god awful nokia e66s.
I am one of the blackberry users, with a Blackberry Bold 9700, and although it does just "work", I really don't like BES (which on the contrary to the phone, definitely isnt plug and play) or the phone in general. This has improved by putting BBOS6 on, but its still not that great. The other users aren't particularily happy with them either, especially when trying to browse the web out of the office (mixture of bolds and curve 8900s)
Combine this with the rather ridiculous £17.50 a month per handset blackberry enterprise license fee on top of the BES server license fee, all things are leading to ditching blackberry. With only having exchange 2003, iphones don't work properly, so they are out of the equation.
I've personally been using Android for coming up to a year now, so am fairly well versed in its strongpoints and shortfalls, especially as I run an Exchange server at home for testing and have all my emails etc going through that into the Desire, in a very similar way to would be used in our SME.
This leaves Windows Phone 7 and Android. A quick call to our account manager at vodafone and the next day my desk looks like this:
From left to right:
Blackberry Bold 9700, HTC Trophy 7 (win phone 7), HTC Desire, HTC Desire Z and HTC Desire HD (all android). The picture was taken with another trophy 7 (the only phone they had available for demo with Windows Phone 7 so i asked for 2, would much prefer a samsung Omnia 7!)
All the phones have a very good feel to them and actually the vanilla Desire is the cheapest feeling of them all, which isn't a bad thing as the desire is a solid bit of kit.
Few server setting changes to get activesync working properly (never been used before) and both operating systems sync'd very easily to exchange, all the contacts were there in seconds etc. Total config time of each OS beyond turning them on was <1 minute, very nice and easy.
I will report back properly on the usage of them all shortly, they've been distributed around a few members of staff. There are 2 immediate shortfalls noted however:
1) Android and tasks. My MD is the first to try the Desire Z, and Froyo by default doesn't synchronise Tasks! I don't personally use them so have never noticed. Nitrodesk touchdown (a £10 app from the market), does however, so we'll be looking at that. Not tried this on WP7
2) Windows Phone 7: images in emails. They don't load by default, and when you press "Download" it just says download unsuccessful. This is a well documented "bug", hopefully this imminent update will fix this? otherwise it's a fairly major nail in the coffin.
One other thing, the MD was the most against moving from blackberry (until the savings were brought up anyway!), but so far is the most won over, he's only had the Desire Z half an afternoon and loves it so far.
I thought this may be of interest to you guys
Tom.
I've been tasked with reviewing the mobile phone situation at work as our contract is coming towards its end. We are a smallish company, with 20 users that have mobiles. 7 of these are blackberrys, the other 13 are god awful nokia e66s.
I am one of the blackberry users, with a Blackberry Bold 9700, and although it does just "work", I really don't like BES (which on the contrary to the phone, definitely isnt plug and play) or the phone in general. This has improved by putting BBOS6 on, but its still not that great. The other users aren't particularily happy with them either, especially when trying to browse the web out of the office (mixture of bolds and curve 8900s)
Combine this with the rather ridiculous £17.50 a month per handset blackberry enterprise license fee on top of the BES server license fee, all things are leading to ditching blackberry. With only having exchange 2003, iphones don't work properly, so they are out of the equation.
I've personally been using Android for coming up to a year now, so am fairly well versed in its strongpoints and shortfalls, especially as I run an Exchange server at home for testing and have all my emails etc going through that into the Desire, in a very similar way to would be used in our SME.
This leaves Windows Phone 7 and Android. A quick call to our account manager at vodafone and the next day my desk looks like this:
From left to right:
Blackberry Bold 9700, HTC Trophy 7 (win phone 7), HTC Desire, HTC Desire Z and HTC Desire HD (all android). The picture was taken with another trophy 7 (the only phone they had available for demo with Windows Phone 7 so i asked for 2, would much prefer a samsung Omnia 7!)
All the phones have a very good feel to them and actually the vanilla Desire is the cheapest feeling of them all, which isn't a bad thing as the desire is a solid bit of kit.
Few server setting changes to get activesync working properly (never been used before) and both operating systems sync'd very easily to exchange, all the contacts were there in seconds etc. Total config time of each OS beyond turning them on was <1 minute, very nice and easy.
I will report back properly on the usage of them all shortly, they've been distributed around a few members of staff. There are 2 immediate shortfalls noted however:
1) Android and tasks. My MD is the first to try the Desire Z, and Froyo by default doesn't synchronise Tasks! I don't personally use them so have never noticed. Nitrodesk touchdown (a £10 app from the market), does however, so we'll be looking at that. Not tried this on WP7
2) Windows Phone 7: images in emails. They don't load by default, and when you press "Download" it just says download unsuccessful. This is a well documented "bug", hopefully this imminent update will fix this? otherwise it's a fairly major nail in the coffin.
One other thing, the MD was the most against moving from blackberry (until the savings were brought up anyway!), but so far is the most won over, he's only had the Desire Z half an afternoon and loves it so far.
I thought this may be of interest to you guys
Tom.
