RIM Service Outage Has Up To 40% Of BlackBerry Owners Eyeing An iPhone

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mac-business

Forty percent of Blackberry owners say they want to switch to another smartphone. Following a service outage and an upcoming move to a new operating system, business professionals surveyed in the U.K. see Apple as the preferred alternative to trouble-plagued Research in Motion.

Apple’s iPhone was the choice of 64 percent of the 500 enterprise professionals expressing a desire to drop RIM’s handset as their businesses smartphone. By comparison, Android was the choice of less than 25 percent of those business pros leaving the RIM fold. Only a slim 5 percent of business workers said they’d opt for a Windows Mobile phone.

The findings mirror a third-quarter survey by Good Technology finding 61 percent of business smartphone activations are for the iPhone, versus 39 percent for Android-based handsets.

Other reasons why the iPhone seems a good fit for enterprise users looking to jump ship is iMessage. The service, which allows owners of iOS devices to exchange text messages, is similar to RIM’s BBM, requiring little adaptation by Blackberry users. Another reason for the affinity with the iPhone is RIM’s upcoming switch to its new BBX operating system based on QNX. The upgrade would likely leave owners of current BB OS 7 devices out in the cold, reports suggest. Both factors make Apple an excellent lifeboat for the sinking RIM ship.

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