Handheld Highlights

Research in Motion, Ltd. (RIM) BlackBerry suffered from an outage in the U.S. that affected services for three hours on last Monday afternoon. Elsewhere, Google Inc. made a new software development kit (SDK) available for vendors building smartphones based on the Android platform. Lastly, new developments push the boundaries of solid state disks (SSDs).

Focal Points:

• An outage related to a system upgrade wreaked havoc for BlackBerry users between 3:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Eastern time last Monday. The three-hour issue affected approximately eight million users and is the second major performance issue to disturb users in the past 10 months. The previous breakdown was attributed to a newly-introduced storage feature that was not properly tested. RIM manages BlackBerry traffic at its headquarters center in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
• Google released a new SDK for its Android smartphone development platform this week, and several partners announced details of their progress and plans for bringing phones to market based on the Android specification. At the Mobile World Congress 2008 gathering in Barcelona, Spain, developers touted the benefits of the Android platform which features both a large screen and a hardware keyboard. Vendors including Texas Instruments, Inc. praised the merits of developing for the Android platform, including the open source nature of the Linux-based platform and the belief that time to market will be reduced. Most platforms require 18 months to complete development, while TI and others expect Android-based phones to only require six months. A group of 30 companies supporting Android announced that they expect phones to arrive at the end of 2008 or beginning of 2009.
• The availability and storage sizes of SSDs are on the rise, as Sandisk Corp., Samsung Electronics, and Toshiba Corp. are all beginning to ship serial ATA II (SATA II) disks capable of storing 64 gigabytes (GB) of information. As an example of performance, the Samsung disk is able to achieve read performance of 100 megabytes per second (MB/s) and write speeds of up to 80 MB/s. These drives are available as premium options on select notebooks given their abilities to use up to 75 percent less power than their traditional magnetic hard disk counterparts. Bitmicro Networks, Inc. expects to be able to deliver a SSD SATA II drive capable of storing up to 832 GB of data, though pricing could approach $40,000 for such a device given current cost structures.

Experton Group believes RIM's second major outage in 10 months fares poorly for the company. RIM is suffering from one or more of the three following issues. Its software testing procedures are insufficient; failover strategies for rerouting traffic to working servers when one or more network elements become unusable are lacking; and/or the company's requirement to control all BlackBerry traffic is fatally flawed. Without question, RIM devices are the most popular handheld devices for enterprise e-mail and applications, and thus, any outage is cause for concern. IT executives are questioning the company's network and traffic management design points – which dictate that RIM remain as a traffic management hub for all traffic – and hoping to understand how problems can be prevented in the future. As RIM believes that these issues are small errors that will be addressed by improving testing and rollout procedures, very little is likely to be done to change RIM's role in controlling wireless traffic and the limited number of data management sites that provide service. The number and abilities of competitors to RIM's stronghold are going to radically increase over the next few years. 

Hence, IT executives are encouraged to pressure RIM to decentralize control over BlackBerry handheld traffic to ensure higher levels of availability and allow for corporations to participate in their own availability achievements.

To the point of RIM competitors, all eyes are on Google's Android platform as being the next big thing in smartphone design. The highly-configurable platform allows developers to mix-and-match form factors and capabilities from a variety of possibilities. Enterprises should expect the open nature of the Linux platform to allow for improved integration with enterprise applications and for available application development talent to be pervasive. IT executives should keep their eyes on Android developments as they are likely to radically shift the future of handheld enterprise computing over the next three to five years.

Although pricing for SSDs remains relatively high, enterprises should expect these to drop to within 20 to 25 percent proximity of magnetic drives within the next three years. This will encourage an increasing number of notebook vendors to adopt SSDs, and Experton Group fully expects this transition to happen en masse over the next several years. The performance improvements of SSDs have recently been substantiated, and IT executives should expect that the current form of SSD technology results in 11 to nearly 17 percent improvement in battery lives. IT executives should expect SSD technology to continue to make large strides in improving in energy consumption, speed, and storage to offer better performance and data storage longevity as compared with magnetic disks.