RIM's Director of Alliances, Tyler Lessard presented at WES 2008 last week what he called "The Latest, the Greatest, the Coolest Applications for BlackBerry Smartphone.". This interview summarizes what he presented. RIM has TV commercials like this one and exciting new consumer products partners like Unify4Life which could make the device the ultimate remote control - not just for managing home stereos and theaters but also in future home security, power management and more.
Of course, still boring compared to what Michael Mace describes in the Nokia ecosystem
"It features, swear to God, a guy who created a self-hypnosis application for the N95, someone who created a bad breath detector, a man in the Witness Protection Program who created a location-aware app to track the hit men chasing him, a ditzy woman who uses the phone to track fertilizer schedules for her plants..."
But as I walked the Solutions Expo at WES 2008 I was struck at how few business applications there were. Let me clarify. Few categories of applications. Plenty of Sales Force automation applications (SAP, Sage, salesforce.com among others were present), Location/Mapping applications (Garmin, Google, TeleNav and several others), traditional applications which help manage email (Blackberry's traditional killer app for business). Oh, there were some POS extensions, some scanners, some voice recognition applications, but overall relatively sparse.
So, my question for readers - as Google and Apple and Nokia expand the ecosystem for mobile apps, what will the enterprise (as against consumer) mobile apps look like in 24 months? Will accountants have journal entry capability so they can work even when they are at a baseball game? Will fields like healthcare and logistics continue to pioneer with vertical apps? And will corporate users care?
