T-Mobile G1's Enterprise Mobility Is Lost in the Cloud (
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Today, Oct. 22, is the celebrated launch of T-Mobile's G1 with Google, the first smart phone based on Google's Android open-source mobile operating system stack. Retail stores
for the phone carrier are opening up at 8 a.m.
to sell what has been reported as 1.5 million G1 units to Web service-hungry users.
What you won't find are business leaders lining up to order major shipments of
the device. Indeed, T-Mobile made no secret at its Sept. 23 unveiling that the G1
would be targeted for family use.
No one can argue this after it was established the G1 wouldn't support Microsoft Exchange Server, generally considered table
stakes for enabling enterprise mobility. Don't expect Google to go there; Android creator Andy Rubin said a third-party programmer would
have to build it.
See G1 pictures here, if you can't make it to a T-Mobile store.
Mort Rosenthal, CEO of Enterprise Mobile, which helps companies plan
enterprise mobility implementations for devices based on Microsoft's Windows
Mobile, discussed why the G1 doesn't pass the enterprise mobility acid test
with me Oct. 21.
I know what you're thinking. Rosenthal would seem to have good reason to
knock the G1 down a few pegs. This may be particularly true given the
speculation from GigaOm's
Om Malik via eWEEK's own Joe Wilcox that Windows Mobile is the odd man out
in the accelerating smart-phone race between Apple's iPhone, Google's Android
and Nokia's Symbian. You may well be right.
Yet what Rosenthal told me makes solid sense, as long as you agree that the
so-called cloud, or Internet, is no platform on which to base a device designed
to house and transmit sensitive and proprietary corporate information.
Rosenthal said what's missing in cloud computing from an enterprise perspective
is control of the information in the cloud. Most enterprises are not going to
be happy with an open communication structure.
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