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For the past 3+ years, at Matrix we have been evaluating smart phones for corporate use. For most companies, the selection of a smart phone device is a non-issue: its RIM's Blackberry product and associated BEZ (Blackberry Enterprise) server.

Being a Waterloo University engineering graduate, I certainly would have no qualms about going the Blackberry route for a corporate smartphone device. However, working through the evaluation process at the corporate level puts a different perspective on these devices.

The biggest issues are: cost (device, dataplans, setup), maintenance, usability (not always in that order) and finally farther down the list - application platform. By application platform I am referring to custom business applications that are outside of contacts, email and calendar. I suspect as time goes on the application platform item will become more important at Matrix, but right now its not a priority.

Matrix users at present though have very basic requirements for a smartphone - they want it to work well as a phone, and be able to use it as a tool for managing their calendar, contacts and email in that order.

The Blackberry excels at these, but its requirement for a server to enable corporate messaging makes it more costly than other offerings, when you factor out the device as an application platform.

While the Blackberry Enterprise Server provides more value in terms of features, the market it was designed to serve has changed since its inception. The security measures on other platforms, while not as sophisticated perhaps as the BEZ, are good enough to be effective (more about this later). The dataplan monitoring and restrictions were something that used to be important - but now that phone companies are being forced to provide more logical plans that offer data pooling and reasonable data limits, the requirement for centralized monitoring has diminished significantly. The BEZ acts as a platform for software development - but other platforms are now providing sophisticated developer tools as well.

Finally the BEZ requirement adds yet another server (albeit virtual) that requires licenses, maintenance, updates, expertise and attention. The additional requirement of a CAL for devices connecting to the BEZ add another layer of cost - especially when you consider that many companies already pay for Exchange CALs.

So at Matrix, the focused shifted to evaluating mobile devices that could directly connect to Exchange via the Exchange push mechanism - which narrowed the search to Windows Mobile based devices.

I have been saying to the blackberry types for a while that the dominance of the RIM server and a key element in the blackberry business model is doomed.

Probably the biggest source of cash for the RIM is the licensing of the BES server and the CALs for the indivdual devices communicating with it.

This was fine when the market consisted of RIM and no other logical alternative. However, the market for email enabled phones is no longer RIMs to dominate. There are a number of excellent alternatives to the RIM BES server: many of which have no or very little cost attached to them.

How to setup the smartphone emulator to be able to access web services:

1. Go to Settings, then Data Connections (Shortcut: L, 8, 9, 2).
2. Change Work Connection to NetCard (Is that short for Network Card? Who knows? *shrug*).
3. Click Done.
4. Go into Internet Explorer (Shortcut: L, 4).
5. Click Menu, then Options (Shortcut: R, 7).
6. Uncheck Automatically detect settings.
7. Change Select Network to Work.
8. Click Done.

You can now browse around with IE and your WebService calls will now work as expected. Well, almost...remember that when adding your Web Reference for the name of the server, use the name of your local development machine, not "localhost". The emulator doesn't get that when you say localhost, you really mean your machine.

From HERE:

Themes: you can use the windows 2002 theme generator, but a la typical microsoft, they are rapidly chaning the OS, so the 2002 generator can't auto-install the themes.

The following instructions allow for theme install: