Filed under: Competitive strategy, Apple Inc (AAPL), Research in Motion (RIMM), Battle of the Brands

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

Research in Motion Ltd.’s (NASDAQ: RIMM) BlackBerry wireless email device has been a staple of the corporate world for years now. RIM, a Canadian company, took the function everyone wanted — simple and superb access to mobile email — and turned that single function into an entire industry. Of course, RIM’s wireless units now handle voice calls, pictures, document editing and more, but that’s not what customers buy BlackBerries for. The single function of secure, instant and mobile email is still the killer application for the BlackBerry.

Enter Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and its uber-popular iPhone that’s been on sale for coming up on a year now. The company has sold way over 4 million of the devices since then and has taken a big swipe at the “smartphone” wireless handset category where the iPhone competes. Reminder: the unit has not even been on the market for a year. Apple has selectively released upgrades to the iPhone to make it more competitive in the business customer arena, and with the possibility of the iPhone being able to handle corporate push email, it might become an even bigger threat to RIM in the very near future.

Yet, the iPhone is still marketed as a consumer device — not a business one. But that’s Apple’s magic: many of its products are meant for and marketed as consumer devices but as just as useful in a corporate setting. Perhaps that is Apple’s secret: use the cloak of a slick consumer device to slowly but surely infiltrate the corporate space. So far, RIM really has not indicated that it’s seen a threat from Apple’s iPhone. The threat was there before the iPhone was launched last June, and it’s growing every single month. This battle has only just begun.

Vote in our poll for iPhone or BlackBerry as your preferred brand, and let us know in the comments why you love it.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Companies Competitive Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.