Would you swap your Blackberry for an iPhone?

20 August 2010

2 minute read

Would you swap your Blackberry for an iPhone?

The rise of the Blackberry - or Crackberry, as it's affectionately know - as the smart phone of choice for bankers has been something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it allows you to stay in the loop while out of the office, but on the other, the flashing red light on top acts like a Siren for checking e-mails at ungodly hours.

But it may have a challenger as the phone de jour in the business world. Earlier this summer, it emerged that Standard Chartered was dropping the Blackberry in favour of the sleeker option of Apple's 'app for ironing your socks' iPhone.

Can we expect other banks to follow suit? Sadly, the answer appears to be a resounding no; at least for the time being. Of the banks we asked, BarCap, Nomura and RBS said they don't offer iPhones to staff, while Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and UBS all declined to comment.

But how long can Blackberry's near monopoly last? There's no denying the iPhone's popularity - global sales rose from 3.8m in Q1 2009 to 8.3m for the same period this year, according to research from technology group Gartner.

If a widespread adoption appears unlikely in the banking sector on a firm-wide basis, they are apparently being inundated with requests from individual employees to use the company coin for their personal iPhones.

This seems more feasible now that the iPhone no longer has an exclusive deal with the O2 network. BarCap, for instance, tells us that it uses Vodafone for its Blackberry accounts, so it at least seems logistically possible to offer the same deal for iPhones.

Still, the Blackberry hasn't exactly been a laggard when it comes to sales - Research in Motion shipped around 37m devices during fiscal 2010, which was a 40% rise on the previous year.

Blackberry is still by far the dominant force in financial services, James Powell, chief technology officer for Thomson Reuters told the newswire.

"I think you'd be crazy to talk about replacing all BlackBerrys," he said.

So, would you need to be surgically removed from you Blackberry before you considered this new-fangled iPhone? Or is it time to break Blackberry's monopoly in the banking sector? Discuss...

AUTHORPaul Clarke

ph
phasme
23 August 2010
@Susan : Susan you might be working for Apple to come here and write some stupids words.
The best solution is to put in rubbish your iphones, ipads.
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sf
sf
23 August 2010
& yeah, and the same amount of mental disorders
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Su
Susan, Cambridge
23 August 2010
I love iPhones! We sold 1.5 million iPhone applications in less than a year. These are only the ones we created. You can not the same with a Blackberry.
Best solution is to have one blackberry and one or two iPhones. Serious bankers have two or three phones.
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To
Tom Tom
22 August 2010
Iphone is for fun, Blackberry for business!
The new blackberry torch has both touch screen for media, web surfing - multi screen, etc while also having the physical keyboard for writing those long emails. The best of both worlds.
If you get blackberry torch then for fun you can just get the i-touch (basically same as i-phone without phone) for media and apple apps.
Simple!
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Jo
John
22 August 2010
I have both and while the iPhone is a better phone and pda, it doesn't have a direct server for emails so you have to enter mail to bring up new emails. Plus it is much easier to write an email of any decent length on the BB.
Of course the biggest difference is when people see a BB they automatically think you are a prat, as only yah-yahing see you next tuesdays have them out in public.
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