Our organization supports the Blackberry. Mainly because it was the pioneer when we were looking for a handheld service. We have been fairly satisfied with the service, though ocassionally we have had some scheduling issues - Outlook and Blackberry being out of synch from a scheduling perspective.

We are a relatively small organization. We had a few employees who had used Blackberry before coming to us; but when we priced out the costs for installing their Exchange adjunct server, it just didn't make economic sense. If we simply went with their service, we had a security issue with email content.

Instead, we've gone with solutions that tie directly to Exchange. To begin with, those were Treos running either PalmOS or WindowsOS. We did try a Samsung, but it was an awful device. We had good success with the Treos until they all, gradually began to fall into their infamous endless reboot loop, at least those with PalmOS did.

Oddly enough, the most reliable and successful devices so far have been the iPhones. Contrary to popular opinion, they connect directly to Exchange already, albeit through an Outlook Web Access interface. One of our IT support staff reported the following anecdote. He'd just landed at an airport and was waiting for his luggage when he got a call from one of the offices experiencing a problem with the 3Com NBX phone system. He knew he was about 2 hours from a good location to VPN back to the office and address the issue and he said that to the caller. As he hung up the call, he looked at the iPhone in his hand. He realized that it had a VPN link back to the office and a full-featured browser. So he VPN'd to the office, logged onto the administrative web interface for the NBX, fixed the problem, dropped the VPN and called back to say that the problem had been fixed. Just then, his luggage arrived.

Another important feature of the iPhone that the other devices generally lack is built in WiFi. The combination of speed improvement and data-service avoidance is significant. Together with support for either PPTP or IPsec VPN, the additional security of direct connection to corporate resources such as Exchange or internal web-oriented applications for sales & marketing is not without value.

There are those who will complain that we are providing employees with iPods for free. However, the flip is that we can put company-branded video, product images, podcasts, and even PDFs on these things. I suppose that the folks into "IT Governance" won't be going overboard too soon. But if iPhone v2 s/w adds as much functionality as it is touted to do, and if the SDK yields just a few solid apps for iPhone to, say, edit the usual Word and Excel documents (it already displays them), then I'd wonder why anybody would want anything else.

Back to my original observation, my guess is that the TCO would be lower than for Blackberry too.