Josh Polhans's List: WP7

Intense innovation has led us to multiple smartphone platforms, more than 100,000 applications for the iPhone alone, mobile support from enterprise application vendors, a variety of 3GL and 4GL development environments, powerful browser technologies, and various mobile middleware platforms. It's one thing to deploy wireless e-mail to your workers. It's quite another to do so in combination with real-time access to enterprise applications such as CRM. Throw in the need for device management and security, and it's no wonder that IT architects can feel overwhelmed.

As for the market leaders, BlackBerry continues to dominate in business settings, with 61% of the respondents who are deploying smartphone applications citing widespread BlackBerry usage. What shocked us, however, is how quickly the iPhone has penetrated enterprises: 27% say the iPhone has widespread use. Windows Mobile (which we expected to be in second place) is at 24%, and Google Android is at 6%. Symbian, the world's leading smartphone OS, continues to struggle to get U.S. business attention, accounting for only 3%, with Palm Pre doing marginally better at 5%.

 

 E-mail has long been the most popular smartphone app, and that's still the case, with 85% of the survey respondents who are deploying smartphone applications citing widespread e-mail use, followed by general-purpose Internet access at 54%, instant messaging at 44%, PIM functions at 33%, and CRM at 23%.