Smartphone take up disappoints

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So far, though, neither the mobile device manufacturers nor the network operators have been able to convince businesses that mobile email financially viable as a tool for the vast majority of employees. In France, for example, Orange says that 70 per cent of its business customers subscribing to a data bundle access their business email accounts. But the total number of such users totals just 140,000, with a further 100,000 people using BlackBerry handheld's on Orange's French network.

Among many business users, mobile email has almost become synonymous with high-flying executives, such has been the success of Research in Motion's BlackBerry in appealing to senior managers, as well as to highly paid professionals in fields such as the law and banking.

However, even though RIM has produced some impressive case studies to show that investing in BlackBerry produces a dramatic return on investment, it is proving much harder to demonstrate a business case for deploying mobile email throughout the ranks, both on BlackBerry and on competing platforms.

Research by Nokia found that the most common barriers to widespread use of mobile email included cost, especially the cost of data plans charged by the cellular networks, complexity, and the difficulty of justifying the investment in business terms. Security, and the perception that the technology is unstable or unreliable are also factors.

"For email, it is very hard to put the return on mobile email down on a spreadsheet," acknowledges Nokia's McDowell. "That is pretty difficult to quantify. What does get qualified is mobile unified communications, with the integration of email and instant messaging."

To this end, Nokia and other manufacturers have been working closely with office phone system manufacturers and Internet telephony providers to enable the mobile phone to act the main device for fixed and mobile voice calls, as well as an instant messaging and email client. For large companies in particular, providing PBX or office phone system functions out to mobile users can bring real productivity benefits, and Internet telephony can bring measurable savings in calling costs.

Businesses are also looking again at the case for giving data-enabled PDAs to blue collar and technical workers.

The improved email functionality in Microsoft's Exchange Server, along with the relative ease of deploying business applications to the Windows Mobile platform is encouraging more companies to look at specialist vertical applications for their mobile staff, including field service, engineering and customer relationship management. Other platforms, including Symbian and BlackBerry, are also boosting their business applications capabilities.

"CRM and business intelligence are the applications we are seeing most demand for in the mobile space," says Richard Hall, chief technology officer for the UK operations of Avanade, the systems integrator.

"Smart phones really were just advanced pagers. They had never really taken hold outside the executive suite but now people want an application platform that can run the same business logic [as their main applications]. That is very powerful." But, as Hall points out, operators still need to address costs - and device manufacturers need to do more to eliminate complexity.

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