The Wall Street Journal reported that Palm saw marketshare growth for its Treo 650 and 700 series mobile phones as a result of the patent dispute between Research in Motion, the manufacturer of BlackBerry handheld devices, and NTP, Inc., a patent holding company based in Arlington, VA. According to the article:
… While the BlackBerry lawsuit is settled, corporations say the episode made them realize they need a contingency plan in case the BlackBerry is ever shut down. Palm, of Sunnyvale, Calif., has tripled its corporate sales force over the past year to work with carriers and to talk to more corporations about the Treo….
In the quarter ended in late November, Palm sold 602,000 Treos, nearing the 645,000 new subscriber accounts that RIM signed on in the same period. And when Palm reports fiscal third-quarter earnings today, analysts project the company will easily double its Treo sales from 279,000 in the year-earlier quarter. Internally, Palm executives say they believe that the Treo will outsell BlackBerrys by the end of this year.
The really amazing thing about large corporations continued support of BlackBerry is the amount of infrastructure on the back end of enterprise messaging systems that must be maintained in order to keep workers’ BlackBerry handhelds running. BlackBerry Enterprise Server software must be co-located with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, and Novell Groupwise in order for users of the BlackBerry handhelds to receive the much touted “push email” features of the platform. Users of email platforms other than Exchange, Domino, and Groupwise are not likely to get the same benefit from having a BlackBerry.
The Palm OS based Treos, such as the 600 and 650, have much more flexibilty in terms of running a variety of email clients that offer enhanced features to a wider-range of mail servers. GoodLink from Good Technologies is very competitive with BlackBerry Enterprise Server for customers whose businesses use Exchange or Domino. Simpler email server environments receive advanced features from the Chatter Email Client which provides push email features for IMAP, and Snapper Mail which provides enhanced features mainly to users of POP mailboxes.
Here at Operation Gadget, my Kathleen and I use twin Treo 650s to access our IMAP mail accounts wirelessly. I’m connected to three separate IMAP accounts simultaneously when I’m out of the office. This is incredible power considering that we run a very simple, Open Source-based email infrastructure. Anyone could do this sort of thing for themselves, if they decided to rent a Linux virtual server and take the time to understand how to setup IMAP and any of a number of Mail Transfer Agents. We use UWimap and exim and they do a fine job for us at minimal cost. [ Subscription required to read most articles from The Wall Street Journal ]