Do ensure that you are comparing like with like, and also consider that the UK mobile phone market is a lot more advanced than the USA one, so some of the reasoning is different.
The Blackberry pricing structure changed considerably earlier this year, which makes anything you read that pre-dates 2010 pretty much out of date. Until that point, to use the full Blackberry feature set you needed BES (or BPS) and the BES option on the devices. That made the Blackberry devices very expensive to run. Here in the UK, you were looking at £35/month plus call charges etc. My Blackberry cost me more to run than my phone used for voice. However, I never once paid for BES. If there were more than 10 devices I told the service provider that I wanted BES free, and if they didn’t hand it over, I would talk to someone else. The profit on BES data is so high, that they hand it over. However now, that has all changed. You can now run a Blackberry against BES Express on the BIS plan. BES Express is free for as many devices as you want. Therefore you can run a Blackberry, with all of the features that the end user wants on the cheaper BIS plans. My Blackberry now costs me less than £15/month to run. Of course if you want the full BES functionality, that means you need a full BES (which you rarely get free unless you have a large number of handsets or are bringing in a lot of business) and you must have the full BES data option on the devices. That makes the cost still pretty high. This PDF from RIM outlines the differences between the options available to you. http://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/business/server/express/ComparisonChart_NA_021610_v3.pdf As for other choices, you will not get full management without paying for additional software. For the iPhone, you would have to look at third party. For Windows Mobile, you would be looking at SCCM or whatever it is called now, or third party. Everyone is still playing catch up with Blackberry for the Enterprise management. Good Technologies (http://www.good.com/) is about the closest you will get to Blackberry and has cross-platform support if you need that. However if you can standardise on the device and don’t allow non-company devices to be used, you will find it easier to support and more cost effective. Simon -- Simon Butler MVP: Exchange, MCSE Sembee Ltd. e: si...@sembee.co.uk w: http://www.sembee.co.uk/ w: http://www.amset.info/ w: http://blog.sembee.co.uk/ Need cheap certificates for Exchange, compatible with the iPhone? http://CertificatesForExchange.com/<http://certificatesforexchange.com/> for certificates from just $23.99. Need a domain for your certificate? http://DomainsForExchange.net/<http://domainsforexchange.net/> Exchange Resources: http://exbpa.com/ From: Paul Hutchings [mailto:paul.hutchi...@mira.co.uk] Sent: 12 October 2010 16:15 To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Most manageable and usable corporate smart phone? Thanks Joe, I’m picking up a bit of a theme when it comes to Blackberry in that some of it seems to be $$$ but they do seem to “just work” and are manageable should you decide to do something that should be fairly trivial but you need to update X number of mobiles. I’ll look into the free vs. pay software. As I said I’m not expecting anyone to RTFM on my behalf but sometimes experience of a product highlights things that aren’t obvious simply by RTFM – are there any features you’d say are “must have” that the free software doesn’t do? From: Joe Pochedley [mailto:joe.poched...@fivesgroup.com] Sent: 12 October 2010 16:09 To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Most manageable and usable corporate smart phone? Blackberries have the most centrally manageable options… However to take advantage of much of that functionality you need to pay for the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). The free BES Express edition has many of the centralized management capabilities disabled, but it’s worth a look depending on your needs….. Depending on your size, BES may or may not be a large expense (obviously, “large expense” is relative to your company’s income statement) ☺ And BES may or may not require its own server (again, depending on various factors)… Plenty of info at the Blackberry site. JP From: John Cook [mailto:john.c...@pfsf.org] Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2010 11:00 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Most manageable and usable corporate smart phone? Blackberries are uber manageable and fairly easy to set up. John W. Cook Systems Administrator Partnership for Strong Families ________________________________ From: Paul Hutchings <paul.hutchi...@mira.co.uk> To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues <exchangelist@lyris.sunbelt-software.com> Sent: Tue Oct 12 10:56:28 2010 Subject: Most manageable and useable corporate smartphone? I’m asking both lists as I guess Exchange compatibility is just as important as general management. So, which smartphones would you choose assuming things like mobile network coverage weren’t an issue. I’ve no direct experience of Blackberry, I have (sadly!) too much Nokia experience, and iPhones seem to more or less just work with Exchange but as with Nokia’s I’m not aware of any way I as an IT person can sit at my desk, specify an action/policy or “something…#157; that should apply to all our phones and hit a big button that says “make it so…#157; – I believe Blackberry can do this? I’m not really asking for a breakdown of everything each does as I can get that from the respective websites, but I think you know where I’m coming at this from once you have a few dozen devices. 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