With big name manufacturers lending their support to the development of Android tablets, the iPad’s market dominant share may soon give way to rising competitors. Expected to follow the same pattern as the smartphone market, updates in Android Honeycomb OS, participation from Motorola (MMI), Lenovo, Acer and other large-scale manufacturers are beginning to chip away at iOS’s global market share. And as Android and iOS continue to fight over the mobile market, it’s RIM that loses out big.
RIM loses hold on mobile business devices
RIM (RIMM) plans on cutting 2,000 jobs, about a tenth of its workforce, as sales continue to slow. Reductions will be made across all areas of the company, as part of a plan to “focus on areas that offer the highest growth opportunities,” as an RIM report states. Pressure has been mounting for RIM since the iPhone raised the bar in smartphone design four years ago, and Android’s OS made a mass appeal to the smartphone market. Like other burdened technology companies, including Cisco (CSCO), RIM is now making hard decisions in its restructure goals.
The move will certainly impact RIM’s forecasts for the current quarter, and reveals the phone-makers vulnerabilities in a rapidly changing mobile market. It is particularly tough for RIM as Android and Apple (AAPL) encroach on the enterprise space. Tablets are changing the way people work, more so than smartphones ever could. And RIM was once able to rely on the business market to buy its handsets, but losing ground in the smartphone and tablet market has really taken its tole on the BlackBerry maker.
Business apps continue to launch on Android
And Android devices are attracting more and more business apps, as employees look to smartphones and tablets as productivity tools in the office and beyond. Intuit launched a QuickBooks app for Android, appealing to small business owners. With QuickBooks Mobile you can create estimates, manage invoices, view customer details and auto-sync with QuickBooks on your desktop. Intuit has been pretty active in the mobile space, finding a ready demographic for extending its existing products.
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Android is a great platform but one thing business users like myself need is proxy settings for company network access. We use it constantly and android does not have this function yet. Right now iPhone allows for individual connections to have proxy settings for such use. You can get a root option for it but there you have to be able to root the device and that is not viable in a corporate setting. Maybe when they update that function we would use it but till then it will be apple.