Smartphone Battle: Blackberry and Treo Go Head to Head

This infrastructure also finally opens up the door to Push email systems, a feature that enterprise level customers demand from the wireless. "The new Treo will enable Palm to compete more effectively against RIM's BlackBerry" Kort says bluntly.

Comparatively, RIM uses its own proprietary software and services. Their Blackberry Enterprise Servers were the first to utilize push-mail technology and experts rave about its efficiency and security. The proprietary operating system, though, has been characterized as a no-frills product, although it gets the job done.

Palm's Push

The partnership with Microsoft enables Palm to open up a war-chest of features to blast at RIM. The most important is real-time push e-mail using Microsoft's Messaging and Direct Push Technology.

The technology makes sense. As soon as email comes to your corporate server, that message is immediately forwarded to your mobile device. In a Pull system (say, your favorite ISP), your device needs to manually poll the server to see if there is any mail. Think of it as continuously getting up from your desk checking the mail-room, when that message could just come straight to your desk.

Experts, such as Vivek Arya of Merrill Lynch’s Vivek, say push email "is required for enterprise," and the reasons are numerous. The most apparent is an issue of time. If you need to poll every so often, there is chance you can get your messages late. It would be a short delay, but in business, time is money. The not so obvious issue is, if you are polling all the time, even if there is no email there, you are paying for that air-time to check.

Given that RIM was the first to market with such technology, they have had time to refine and perfect it. "RIM’s push email architecture," Arya states, "is superior to Microsoft’s in the critical aspects of security, bandwidth optimization (better battery life), device management and others."

Because of this, companies have grown comfortable with RIM. It is unlikely they will jump on to the Palm/Ms bandwagon immediately, as "corporate IT departments are largely still evaluating the Windows-based Treos," JP Morgan's Coster noted in his report.

Arya backs up this claim saying "a recent CIO survey indicated that the market remains robust and CIOs continue to rely on RIM."

So Palm is pushing, but it will be hard to dislodge a company with so much weight. "In our opinion," Lynches Arya said, "RIM’s vast deployed base of [about] 60,000 enterprise servers is a formidable barrier to entry for new competitors."