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.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
14 responses to “RIM Service Outage Has Up To 40% Of BlackBerry Owners Eyeing An iPhone”
As a blackberry user for years, I know the struggles and fear associating with ditching that device. However I made the switch years ago. Its hard for me to see now in late 2011 and the advancements of iOS and Android why anyone is still looking at the BB platform at all.
why does the picture show the Macbook Pro with integrated 3G prototype?!
At least if more corporations switch to iPhones, it might put Apple in better standing with Wall Street since it could give Apple a longer term price stability and take away that “toy device” stigma.
It’s not a MacBook Pro. Now the question is, why does the picture show a PowerBook G4 15″ and a Dell Latitude and no iPhones or Blackberries?
Is it just me, or is the title misleading?
I am currently using a Blackberry, even though I only use Apple-branded computers and own an iPad. Well, this event was the final stroke in a long series of disappointments with RIM. I should receive my iPhone 4S in two days (I’m in one of those left-out countries that will only get the iPhone 4S on Friday).
RIM lost me as a Blackberry customer since this event. That and it’s inability to keep up with the technology, the overpriced “BIS” (and I’m not even talking about “BES”) premium on my mobile contract for essentially opening up one port on the filtering firewall of my carrier, that’s it for me.