Appleinsider is reporting that Halliburton is switching 4,500 employees from Blackberry to iOS.
It would seem that apps are a major reason why this is happening:
Approximately 4,500 Halliburton employees currently have BlackBerrys," a spokeswoman for the company confirmed to AppleInsider. "We are making this transition in order to better support our mobile applications initiatives."
Indeed, if you're a developer one of worst things about Blackberry is that it's not easy to develop for. Major OS changes can break compatibility (more so than on other platforms) plus there are too many screen resolution sizes.
One of the advantages of a proprietary OS should be that there is less fragmentation. However, one RIM the move to OS 6.0 caused many programs to not be compatible plus the move to OS 7.0 didn't change things. The current batch of OS 7.0 berries have 480x360 (Curve 9360, 9380, Bold 9790), 640x480 (Bold 9900) and 800x480 (Torch 9810, 9860).
While it's true smartphones have had business apps for years - A pocket PC with a bar code scanner comes to mind. This is a sign that Smartphones have reached a point where they're powerful enough that a large company would consider deploying apps across a large number of employees.
What do you think?