As for the cost difference, Bonadero said, many of the costs attributed to the laptop stem from the already present stable of tech workers at corporations. And although there is minimal expense in supporting email and calendar information on handhelds, he said, it is actually quite costly for big companies to move their main applications over to devices such as a Palm, those based on Microsoft's Pocket PC or BlackBerry. RIM also faces challenges. In the United States, RIM operates on two paging networks, both of which are often congested in major cities. In many cases, RIM has enough of its devices to fill additional orders but is unable to do so because of network limitations, according to the report.
Overseas networks are even further behind.
For that reason, as well as the inherent limitations of a handheld's small screen, the laptop is not likely to see its role in the corporate world diminish too much in the near future. Bonadero, an avid BlackBerry user himself, concurred. Bonadero said he uses his Blackberry while traveling during the day. But once at a hotel, he plugs in his laptop to read email attachments, check his presentations and do other work that requires more data entry than is practical on a pager-size device. In all, Bonadero figures his laptop usage has declined only to the extent that he has responded to a few emails by the time he logs on via his notebook.