Companies — lots of them — are still buying Windows Mobile smart phones, and Microsoft Corp. doesn’t want to let iPhone mania make them forget. During Microsoft’s most recent fiscal year, 325 enterprises purchased at least 500 Windows Mobile phones, with many buying many more, said Scott Rockfeld, group products manager for the mobile communications business at Microsoft, in a Friday interview.
With all of the hype surrounding the iPhone 2.0 launch recently, which includes some capabilities to synchronize against some of your Exchange data directly with the server, Microsoft doesn’t want IT pros to lose sight of the fact that Windows Mobile is still very big in business, although still behind RIM’s popular Blackberry platform. Even at that, there are a lot of companies with RIM’s BES server that use Windows Mobile devices, and over 100 are decommissioning their BES server. The article also mentioned one company buying 10,000 Windows Mobile devices but wouldn’t give the name of the company, speculating only that it might be Wal-Mart, the world’s largest private employer.
Windows Mobile smart phones — including the hot HTC Touch, the Samsung BlackJack, Motorola’s Moto Q and 150 or so other models — actually outshipped iPhones by a margin greater than 2 to 1 in the first quarter of 2008, according to Gartner Inc.
For the fiscal year that ended June 30th, Microsoft sold nearly 20 million Windows Mobile licenses, according to a letter last month by Microsoft Vice President Andy Lees (download PDF).
And despite the iPhone 3G’s strong opening-weekend sales (download PDF), Rockfeld noted that technology research firm IDC predicted that Windows Mobile will continue to outsell the iPhone 2 to 1 in the consumer market by 2012 and in the business space by 9 to 1.
“So you can see the hype versus the reality,” he said.
[via computerworld]
