Hey guys/gals. I've had the Droid since launch day as my personal phone and I absolutely love it. At my job, our contract with Tmobile is up here pretty soon, and we are looking to move to Sprint to save some money. We have one Evo right now that Sprint is letting us test drive.
How do you all think the Evo would do in a corporate setting? Currently we all have BlackBerry's. They work decent, but we are looking for a change. Personally, I don't know that I can trust a phone with such a beast of a screen to last all day. In our corporate office we are sending/receiving e-mail all day, on the phones quite often, in short we use our phones at all times. Especially when in the field.
Anyone here have experience with using the Evo in a corporate/business setting? Any input would be greatly appreciated.
In the context for work/enterprise IT supported email, an Android phone with HTC Sense right now is better than any other Android option. Meaning, the Evo and its HTC brethren have a leg up out of the box, and I say this from my personal experience and from the feature support with remote wipe and other EAS feature support on the phone client.
You haven't mentioned anything about the IT infrastructure backend for your organization, so I'll assume you're not too clear on the details. There are a few ways that your organization could have deployed blackberrys depending on the size of the organization:
1) In-house BES server
2) Rely on t-mo/RIM for BIS
3) Some email solution and use pop/desktop redirectors
Since 3 is highly unlikely in an enterprise setting, I'll assume you have options #1 or #2. In that case, I think that switching AWAY from Blackberry is probably a far fetched case. I cannot see an organization managing to convince all relevant stakeholders to switch from a Blackberry to some other solution. That's highly unlikely.
In all likelihood, your organization is considering going with Sprint instead of t-mo for data/phone (and/or BIS). In which case, the discussion about Blackberry vs. Android is moot... in all likelihood, your company will continue to have Blackberrys supported and deployed for most people.
Your organization may choose to support Android phones IN ADDITION to Blackberrys. For PUSH email, this requires either Exchange Active Sync (if your company has Exchange servers and OWA, then you already have EAS support--it probably requires IT to click the button to turn it on) or Gmail IMAP push. There's nothing wrong with that, and in-fact I use my Evo with my company's EAS and I'm very happy with it. My company, a fortune 500 with 50k employees, recently started to "officially" support Android phones (although, one could have at anytime obtained their own phone... any phone... and setup their EAS client) and a lot of people are happy with it.
I used to work in IT support, and the one thing I learned is... simpler is better. Less to support, is less work. The more that is supported, the more idiotic things users will do. Enabling EAS support means tacitly allowing iPhones, Andriod phones, Palm phones, in fact EVERY OTHER PHONE OUT THERE to use mobile email. This, while a good thing for the end user, is something that from an enterprise consideration must be taken into account. Can the existing infrastructure (since usually the OWA server, and server handling EAS is the same, at smaller enterprises this can also mean the same box as the Exchange server) handle the additional load (since the BES or BIS will not be)? Can helpdesk/support folks handle the additional support requirements? Which phone platforms to officially support along with enabling EAS? Only Android? All of them? No official support, get it at your own risk?
For an enterprise, there's a lot more cost considerations that go into supporting a phone. It's a different question from the simple, "Does it work? Can it work?" type of questioning. There's a CBA consideration that any IT manager/stakeholder will pursue, as well as a the, "why break what is not broken" consideration. "Can the phone battery last all day? (and mine lasts about 36 hours)" is actually a pretty minor concern because that is easily solvable--either make the settings such that it will last all day, or get a phone that will (maybe the Epic? who knows, doesn't matter...).