Smartphone Buyer's Guide

Where Jim Malloy goes, so goes his Palm Treo 650. During a recent trip to China, Malloy used the smartphone to review customer accounts and move along projects that couldn't wait until his return. And there's no prying Treos from the hands of his salespeople, who for the past few months have been accessing a CRM application from the handheld. "If I asked the sales managers to turn in their Treos, they would shoot me," says Malloy, VP of sales at welding equipment company Miyachi Unitek. In the bygone age of the PDA, getting e-mail by BlackBerry was the mark of business cool. In the emerging smartphone society, cool will be not having to carry a laptop at all. Newer device models from Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Research In Motion, and others cram access to e-mail, the Web, and ever-more business apps and company intranets in with the look and function of a cell phone. Never mind the annoyingly tiny screen and short battery life. With starting prices of around $200, trust us, everyone's going to want one of these. So IT had better be on top of the issues, from which phones make the most sense to the management problems they create. What follows is a buyer's guide, laying out the top smartphone vendors' strategies, strengths, and weaknesses.

EETimes.com - Smartphone Buyer's Guide