[General Topics] eaglesteve:
Compare iPhone vs Android as a business phone

We have so far touched on a few areas:

- Full exchange support

- Multi exchange support

- Use as a dual line professionally sounding business line phone

- Ability to save and edit office documents

Let's move on to a few other areas in this post and focus on the question of "can the phone be used to built mobile applications with access to the backend enterprise system?"

First, let's understand that you can't simply decide to introduce an application just like that in a typical corporation. There are security issue, technical infrastructural issue/cost, complexity, capital budgeting, return on investments justifications, and host of other issues that must be considered before one could start using iPhone as a tool for mobile employee. This is a good video for us to get an appreciation of such issues.

Then, there is a question of whether or not the enterprise resource planning software vendor is able to provide an technical architecture infrastructure to faciliate the building of such applications. This is critical from cost perspective. It's good to know that SAP and iPhone is able to provide and demonstrate such a infrastructure.

Support for mobile business users requiring ERP information such as those data coming from SAP (for those of you who are unaware, this is the world's most popular business software covering functionalities such as General Leger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets, Sales order, Purchasing, Inventory Control, Treasury, Corporate budgeting and monitoring, Human Resource, Expense claim and processing, ,payroll, plant maintenance, data warehousing, CRM, etc, etc, and is used by many top companies around the world).

If you're someone in the corporate world with responsibility of approving purchasing orders, for example, you might want to have the SAP system sending out your approval task to your mobile phones and allows you to approve or reject it there, as demonstrated in this video for iPhone.

You might also be an operational user on the move but requiring access to the backend system without carrying your notebook around. With iPhone, you could perform at least some of these transactions on the move, as shown here.

If you're a sales and marketing guys working on leads, quotations, etc, you're able to use iPhone's SAP CRM functionalities on the move, like what's shown here and here.

Or you might be an employee needing to record and submit your time on jobs, submit leave requests, find out your leave balance, etc, all using iPhone as demonstrated here.

There are many more scenarios which I can't possibly list all. Many of such applications are custom developed specifically for a company to meet their specific needs but there are also many standard off the shelf applications available on the App Store. All I have to say is that companies around the world are using iPhone for serious business use today.

Many of us are using our mobile phones to do internet banking. There is absolutely no reason why company employees should not use their phone to perform day to day business activities beyond just receiving emails, reading and editing office documents, and making calls.

How often do you hear people saying that iPhone is just a toy, and is only good for games, bla bla bla? Nothing can be further from the truth. I think every phone has the potential. The biggest question is probably how widely used is that phone by your employees already. Also, what's large corporation's attitude and receptivity towards building application on it. No point developing something on an unpopular and unfriendly platform I guess. I got the feeling that iPhone is doing well in these aspects.

I suspect that due to the small screen size, some of these applications will be more suited on the iPad rather than iPhone. The advantage the iPhone applications have is that they could all work on the iPad also, although one might really want to redesign some of the interfaces at least to take advantage of the larger screen area.

How far has Android phone moved on in this area? Are there already many corporation developing real business applications on it? Are they many off the shelf applications in the market place for SAP, Oracle, CRM, Quotation, and related fields? I got a feeling that while it is definitely moving toward more widespread acceptance in the corporate world, it has not made as far inroads into it as iPhone. Any different insight you guys have which you might like to share here?