Smartphones and accompanying cloud services offer exciting prospects for small and medium-sized businesses.

The mobile phone has come a long way in enabling businesses since first becoming commercially viable in the early 90s. At first it unchained us from our desks, allowing us to make and receive calls from anywhere. Then came SMS. Soon after, it swallowed our rolodexes, wrist-watches, alarm clocks, diaries, cameras and GPS navigation devices. Now we’ve entered the era of apps where specialised business needs can be met on mobile smartphones. The next victim of the mobile phone is likely to be your laptop.

Far from just a communications device, the smartphone is increasingly becoming the centre of our digital lives. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, Motorola introduced its Atrix – a mobile phone that can be clipped into a laptop case and act as a desktop computer too. It’s another step towards you carrying everything you need in your pocket, and connecting your phone to external monitors and input devices as and where you require them.

For 2011, however, we aren’t quite there yet. Businesses have a lot to consider when choosing between smartphone platforms and how to integrate these into their organisations. A war is currently waging between Apple, Google, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Nokia and countless smaller manufacturers and platform providers. Google’s operating system Android is in the lead, while Apple reigns supreme in terms of revenue. BlackBerry is the tried-and-tested business smartphone, but has lost ground in market share in developed countries. And you can be sure Microsoft and Nokia – which announced a new partnership this year – will have a thing or two to say before the dust settles.

So which of these platforms should businesses consider? Is there a clear winner at this moment in time? The answer to the latter is no. In terms of what is available, however, there are now more choices than ever.


To the victor

Microsoft and Nokia are working at building a third mobile ecosystem that will take the fight to Apple and Google. In less than a year, Android has grown its smartphone market share from 14% to over 30%. Apple has about 16% of the global market with its iPhone, and Research in Motion, the company behind BlackBerry, has fallen to 14%. Microsoft has 3% and Symbian – the Nokia operating system – is on 31%.

It’s wrong to look at this battle in terms of the devices themselves. While the cool factor of the iPhone has a lot to do with its success, the real fight is between ecosystems – combinations of hardware, software, application stores and services. How well does your smartphone integrate with your other computing devices and online services?

BlackBerry, with its tight integration with network operators and advanced security, has had success with corporates in the past, but is finding it hard to compete in terms of broader integration. The iPhone integrates very well with Apple Mac computers and does a great job of services too. Microsoft has Windows Phone 7 that naturally integrates very well with the personal computer versions of Windows and Microsoft’s services from Windows Live to Xbox Live, Bing and new offerings that will come via its relationship with Nokia.

Whereas large corporations used to go straight to BlackBerry, now they pass go and are increasingly rolling out iPhone. This is driven, in part, by good security on the Apple iOS platform, a wide selection of productivity and niche industry apps in the iTunes apps store, and the consumerisation of technology; simply put, executives want the cool phone.

There is nothing wrong with BlackBerry as a platform, but it needs attention from developers to live up to the flexibility brought to iPhone and Android by third-party applications.