Users, firms at odds on mobile devices

Companies and their employees might find themselves in a tug of war over enterprise-class mobile phones, an emerging set of devices that can run multimedia entertainment, games and business applications.

Also: Carriers increase companies' control over handhelds

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Companies and their employees might find themselves in a tug of war over enterprise-class mobile phones, an emerging set of devices that can run multimedia entertainment, games and business applications.

Also: Carriers increase companies' control over handhelds

With these high-function handhelds, companies finally have a platform that's fully mobile, almost always connected and powerful enough to use for applications that certain employees need on the road, such as salesforce automation and CRM. But IT executives are bracing themselves for future threats, including attacks that might come through consumer applications. At the same time, businesses are seeking ways to keep the cost of personal phone use out of their expenses and some service providers are responding.

"There's no device that's in worse shape in terms of manageability than a smart phone because for years [the cell phone] has been a personal device," says Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney.

Examples of enterprise network-oriented devices include the Nokia 6820 smart phone and 9300 wireless phone-PDA, the palmOne Treo 650, the Siemens SK65 and SX66, Motorola's MPX and Research In Motion's voice-equipped wireless PDAs.

In September, IDC forecast converged phone and data devices to outsell ordinary handheld data devices both worldwide and in the U.S. For 2004, it projected sales of 17.7 million converged devices worldwide and 4.8 million in the U.S., compared with 9.4 million data handhelds worldwide and 3.6 million in the U.S. Nearly 15% of those converged devices would go to enterprise accounts, IDC said.

At October's CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment trade show, where vendors and operators promised nonstop fun for consumers in the form of games, photo sharing, video, custom ring tones and other applications and content, service providers also pushed the new devices as business tools.

Business applications should start hitting smart phones in vertical industries in the first half of 2005 and in general corporations in the second half, according to David Hayden, co-founder, president and CEO of consultancy MobileWeek. Consumer use of advanced data services is just getting started. Probably less than 10% of users are buying games or exchanging photos over the air, he says.

"Most people don't download and most people don't even use the picture messaging," Hayden says.

The potential benefits of mobile devices are clear to Steve Philpott, president of Bearing Belt Chain, an industrial equipment distributor in Las Vegas, who has replaced three sales representatives' conventional PDAs with palmOne Treo 650 phone-PDAs. He plans to get five more Treos. With the old PDAs, salespeople had to synchronize data with their office PCs before they went on the road. With the Treos, they can change plans in the middle of a trip and still have a chance to synchronize all the data they need, which also is more up to date, Philpott says. A side benefit to the combination device is that there is one less thing for an employee to misplace, he says.