The PDA Question

Ok, so even the average soccer mom is now equipped with a PDA from their chosen wireless phone provider, but what’s the best for the business owner who needs email, calendar, contacts, but not games, video messaging or a professional grade digital camera built in? This has become a great water cooler debate with predominantly 3 different sides. You have the Blackberry side, Windows Mobile, and most recently the Apple iPhone.

Blackberry from RIM is a stalwart industry favorite. Its robust, feature rich, and has great devices to choose from. They were a market leader and therefore have significant market share which helps with support, general product knowledge, and popularity. From a system side, to integrate well with an Exchange or Small Business Server, Blackberry’s require their own proprietary software. The costs are a bit higher for maintenance, device choices are limited to RIM’s designs, but the feature set is significant including remote management to help protect your company’s data that resides on the device down to even being able to track call logs from the devices themselves. We like the Curve and the 8800 series.

Windows Mobile is Microsoft’s answer to the Blackberry, with one significant difference. Microsoft doesn’t make any PDA’s. Windows Mobile devices are hardware from manufacturers like Motorola, Palm, and Samsung running the Windows Mobile Software. Being device agnostic allows the consumer a wider range of hardware with typically better pricing. Our favorite feature of the Windows Mobile devices is that they allow you to connect to your Outlook Mailbox without any extra software or hardware. The technology is called Active Sync and it’s built into Exchange Server versions 2003 and 2007 and SBS 2003. ActiveSync allows for full real-time synchronization with your email, contacts, and calendar in the office to your Windows Mobile PDA. We like the Motorola Q and the Samsung Blackjack II from this side of the PDA world.

With the 2^nd generation iPhone just released the biggest news for corporate users is that the latest version of the software on the iPhone can use ActiveSync the same way that WindowsMobile devices do. This means full email, calendar, and contact sync with your Apple iphone. You’ll still have to cradle your iPhone to get music, videos, and applications there, but for the business data that we all seem to need in our pockets, the iPhone is now a legitimate option. The new iPhone includes GPS and 3G speeds so its now in the big leagues of corporate PDAs.