All Things Digital

With its curvier edges, stylish silver trim, half-VGA 480-by-320 pixel screen and improved iTunes compatibility, Research in Motion’s (RIMM) new BlackBerry Bold should be a big hit with IT operations professionals convinced the iPhone isn’t an enterprise-class mobile device but driven to near-aneurysm by discontented employees demanding them.

The device is largely as expected–an iPhonish-looking thing with both GPS and Wi-Fi, 1GB of permanent flash memory, a 2-megapixel camera, full HTML browsing, 3G support on GSM networks with HSDPA access and, of course, the BlackBerry’s one-trick killer app: instant, secure email. That’s a compelling combination for business users and casual ones not easily swayed by the iPhone’s hype juggernaut as well. Indeed, Citigroup analyst Jim Suva says it could boost RIM’s quarterly shipments by 200,000 to 400,000.

But perhaps not without a bit of struggle. The BlackBerry Bold won’t ship until as late as August, which means Apple (AAPL) could beat it to market with the enterprise-friendly 3G iPhone it’s rumored to be uncrating at its Worldwide Developer’s Conference in June. Which has got to worry RIM. After all, the first-generation iPhone had claimed a 28% market share by the fourth quarter of 2007. That’s still less than the BlackBerry, which holds about a 41% market share, but the iPhone hasn’t even been on the market a year.

Canada’s long national nightmare has ended. The iPhone’s coming to the Great White North. Apple (AAPL) and Canadian wireless provider Rogers Communications (RCI) have finalized a deal that will soon bring the iPhone to the RIM BlackBerry’s backyard.

“We’re thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year,” Rogers chief executive Ted Rogers said in a statement just full of details. “We can’t tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned.”

Good news for Rogers, which had suggested prior to the iPhone’s launch it would offer the phone in Canada, but was later forced to admit it hadn’t yet inked a deal with Apple.

Good news, too, for Canadian cellphone users. Particularly if Apple was able to wring a substantial reduction in wireless plan charges from Rogers–which, like all Canadian carriers, is notorious for its exorbitantly priced data rates. In the U.S., AT&T’s (T) combined iPhone service and data plans start at $59.99 for 450 anytime minutes, 5,000 additional night and weekend minutes, and unlimited data. A comparable plan from Rogers Wireless runs about $295 per month. And while the company recently began offering an “Unlimited On-Device Mobile Browsing Plan,” it doesn’t apply to BlackBerries, Windows Mobile devices or other smart-phones.

Turns out Apple (AAPL) isn’t the only company whose smart phones are in short supply this spring. According to Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt, Research in Motion (RIMM) and Palm (PALM) are suffering shortages as well.

In a research note, McCourt says RIM’s BlackBerry Pearl is pretty tough to find these days–online and off. And Palm’s Treo 755p has disappeared from Sprint’s shelves entirely. Customers looking for one must either settle for the Palm Centro or wait until the company releases the next iteration of the Treo 755p or the Treo 800w.

As McCourt notes, shortages like these are bad news for RIM and awful news for the downtrodden Palm. “The abrupt disappearance of the Treo 755p at Sprint is somewhat concerning,” observes McCourt. “This product was selling reasonably well and, although we expect its contribution to be marginal following the 800w’s launch this summer, the 755p’s absence at Sprint clearly means Palm is foregoing some near-term sales opportunities.”

It’s worth noting here as well that Apple is still dealing with a pretty lean inventory of iPhones. McCourt says about half of the Apple stores he contacted had the device in stock. Said McCourt, “While we believe this is related to a product transition, current iPhone shortages are almost certainly causing some degree of missed sales opportunities.”

What we saw today was the spark. The explosion will continue for 20 years. We will all feel the warmth. What we saw today was the beginning of two decades of mobile domination by Apple. What Microsoft and Windows was to the desktop, Apple and Touch will be to mobile.”

–Jason Fried, 37 Signals

Apple’s iPhone hasn’t supplanted RIM’s BlackBerry as the gold standard of mobile business tools, but give it another year or so and it just might.

At Apple’s town hall event this morning, CEO Steve Jobs revealed that the iPhone had claimed 28% market share by the 4th quarter of 2007. That’s still less than the BlackBerry, which holds 41% market share, but the iPhone hasn’t even been on the market a year. What’s more, the iPhone accounted for 71% of U.S. mobile browser usage.

Should RIM be worried? A reporter put that question to Apple CEO Steve Jobs this morning and here’s the answer he was given:

You should ask them … we’re not sending them a message, we’re sending customers and developers a message that we’re trying to serve their needs. Remember, the iPhone’s been out less than a year, this stuff will be shipping right around the one-year anniversary to every iPhone customer.”

Translation: Yes. Because without a push email advantage, what’s special about the BlackBerry? NOTHING.

Microsoft isn’t always unrequited in love. This morning the software giant said it had agreed to acquire Danger Inc., maker of T-Mobile’s SideKick smart phone, for an undisclosed sum.

Why?

“It completes the picture for us in terms of making the transition from just being on the business side of things to being on the consumer side of things,” said Robbie Bach, Microsoft’s president of entertainment and devices.

Seems Microsoft really is serious about the consumer cellphone business after all. But what’s it going to do with Danger? Said Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg, “The SideKick had strong appeal as the anti-BlackBerry for younger audiences and it will be really interesting to see how MSFT integrates the technology, business model and overall device cachet to a culture more at home selling to enterprise CIOs than it is selling to rock stars.”

Could this be the beginning of a Zune-based cellphone ?

In-flight Wi-Fi is no longer a matter of if or when, but of now.

Beginning next week, JetBlue Airways will offer free customized Yahoo email and instant-messaging service on a single New York-to-San Francisco flight (No. 641). The service will also enable passengers to access email from a Wi-Fi ready BlackBerry.

In the months ahead we’ll see American Airlines, Virgin America and Alaska Airlines offer broader Web access for a fee of about $10 a flight. Not an unreasonable price. According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, 26% of leisure travelers would pay $10 for Internet access on a two- to four-hour flight and 45% would pay that on a flight longer than four hours.

“I think 2008 is the year when we will finally start to see in-flight Internet access become available,” Forrester analyst Henry Harteveldt told the New York Times. “In a few years time, if you get on a flight that doesn’t have Internet access, it will be like walking into a hotel room that doesn’t have TV.”

Though Apple hasn’t yet unveiled, or perhaps even developed, its strategy for integrating the iPhone with business software systems in a way that won’t give IT executives aneurysms, its plans to bring the device to the enterprise market appear to be going quite well. This in spite of dubious security folk and leery analysts like Gartner’s Ken Dulaney who once said: “We’re telling IT executives to not support it because Apple has no intentions of supporting (iPhone use in) the enterprise. This is basically a cellular iPod with some other capabilities and it’s important that it be recognized as such.”

Thing is, Apple likely does intend to support the iPhone in enterprise, and even if it doesn’t, a lot of people plan to use it there anyway. According to new research from IDC, 70% of the people who own or are planning to buy an iPhone intend to use the device as a business tool. “The results of our poll suggest a preference for both personal and business usage among those that own or plan to purchase an iPhone in the next 12 months,” said Sean Ryan, research analyst for IDC’s Mobile Enterprise Device Solutions. “This coincides with a growing trend in the proliferation and uptake of other converged mobile devices designed to meet both the business and consumer requirements of mobile workers.”

Like it or not, the iPhone is being “user pushed” into the enterprise space. As Mark Blowers, senior research analyst at Butler Group, noted this past summer, “With remote working becoming more popular, there will be increasing pressure on the IT department to integrate a growing number of different mobile devices with the existing infrastructure. The iPhone could well be another BlackBerry that the IT manager will be compelled to adopt.”

NTP has finally found a good use for the $612.5 million patent settlement it won from BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion last year: underwriting more patent-infringement lawsuits.

Last Friday the patent holding firm sued AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile for infringing on its portfolio of mobile email-services patents and demanded they pay royalties on the sales of BlackBerries and other devices that send and receive email. Apparently NTP feels that because Good Technology, Visto and RIM have licensed the same patents, these big wireless carriers should as well. Said the company in its complaint against Verizon: “Verizon’s continued infringement with its present knowledge of NTP’s patent rights and their relevance to defendant’s operations is reckless and willful.”

NTP’s lawsuit will no doubt again raise questions about the validity of its patents, a number of which are still under re-examination by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office–those, that is, that haven’t already been rejected.

So much for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s claim that “there’s no chance the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” According to market-research outfit iSuppli, Apple’s iPhone outsold all smart phones in the United States during July, outpacing sales of Palm’s Treo and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, not to mention handsets from Nokia, Motorola and Samsung.

In its research note published this morning, iSuppli said that the iPhone accounted for 1.8% of all mobile handset units sold during the month. Although this could reflect first-month demand for a product people had been waiting to buy since January, it’s nevertheless not bad for a new entrant in a very competitive market. And a remarkable achievement for one partnered up with AT&T. “While iSuppli has not collected historical information on this topic, it’s likely that the speed of the iPhone’s rise to competitive dominance in its segment is unprecedented in the history of the mobile-handset market,” iSuppli wrote. “While the speed of the iPhone’s ascent to the top of the smart-phone and feature-phone charts is remarkable, it’s equally amazing that Apple achieved this in the face of numerous, well-entrenched competitors.”

Seems Apple is well on its way to exceeding its goal of 10 million iPhones shipped during calendar year 2008–roughly 1% of global cellphone shipments.