Millions of new smart phones continue to ship every month, and many of them find their way into businesses to help workers do their jobs in innovative new ways. Many of these same phones will be replaced within a year because they are not durable enough to work reliably in new enterprise work environments. When smart phones will be used by new categories of users to support new business processes, there are new requirements for phones themselves. Ruggedness is at the top of the list. If phones fail and worker productivity suffers, the cost is much greater than the price of the phone.
With smart phones now being used by professionals in fields ranging from field service to customer care, evaluating and selecting the optimal device has become much more challenging. Once enterprises could base their selections mainly on coverage maps, rate plans and the look and feel of the phones themselves, but now they must carefully consider durability, device lifecycles, available enterprise software, support for bar code scanning and much more.
This white paper takes an in-depth look at which smart phone features make work easer for users in emerging enterprise applications and explains why ruggedness is a requirement. It focuses primarily on the needs of workers who will use phones to communicate, run enterprise applications and service customers or equipment in non-office environments. By understanding the work environment and user requirements that impact smart phones for these emerging environments, enterprises can choose devices that will provide the most reliable performance, longest lifecycles and superior return on investment (ROI).
