iPhone most popular business phone; BlackBerry loses vital street-cred

The iPhone has outshone the BlackBerry in the business handset arena, with what will be a major blow to the enterprise-oriented smartphone manufacturer.

In the thrillingly-titled Mobile Workforce Report, more than 2,300 enterprise employees were polled, and it was found that the iPhone amassed more users than the BlackBerry did -- and by a significant margin, too.

While for the same third-quarter in 2010 when the iPhone's share of the market was just over 31 percent, the BlackBerry in this past quarter dropped to just 32 percent. The iPhone excelled this past quarter by significantly increasing its enterprise user share to 45 percent.

Android nearly doubled its share from last year, from slightly over 11 percent to just shy of 22 percent, leaving the Google mobile operating system in third place. That left Symbian in fourth place with a hefty drop from 12 percent to 7 percent, with Microsoft's mobile market share dwindling to just over 5 percent.

Though BlackBerry's descent is not a sign that the company is no longer making its mark on the enterprise zone, it does show the increasingly competitive atmosphere that the Ontario-based giant has to compete with.

But it will be a knock to the BlackBerry business, as the company has always found a safe haven in the enterprise world, for offering secure and self-hosted server infrastructure, allowing businesses and enterprises to hold onto their encryption keys. This alone makes the decentralised system more secure.

Next year's projections are just as interesting, with 18 percent saying they will buy an iPhone, just over 11 percent for an Android handset with nearly 4 percent hoping to buy a Windows Phone device.

Only 2.3 percent of those polled will buy a BlackBerry; figures probably not helped by the recent global outage which left some without service for nearly four days.

Though the outage left only consumer users of the BlackBerry Internet Service without data, many enterprises still use these services, meaning many enterprises and businesses were nevertheless left without service.

Related:

• BlackBerry passes 8 million mark subscriber milestone in UK
• As consumers flock for iPhones, the enterprise still needs BlackBerry
• Samsung to rival Apple, BlackBerry in messaging: Doomed to fail?
• BlackBerry facing dark days; pulls out Messenger on Android, iOS wildcard
• iGeneration: Five reasons why you should forget the BlackBerry
• CNET: iPhone more popular than BlackBerry for business users