Dianne See Morrison
mocoNews.net
Wednesday, August 13, 2008 5:00 PM

Apple ( NSDQ: AAPL) or RIM: who's got it tougher as the two try to increase sales by branching out into each others traditional customer segments? FT.com takes a look at the efforts so far, and while there is certainly interest in the iPhone among business users, and RIM's consumer efforts still have a way to go, Nomura analyst Richard Windsor concludes that Apple will have a harder time going corporate than RIM ( NSDQ: RIMM) will have breaking into the consumer market.

While Apple has improved security and email on the iPhone, corporates are still wary. Plus, there's the question of the iPhone's reliability, whose credibility was damaged over ongoing issues with Apple's email, calendar and file-sharing service MobileMe. RIM suffers from the opposite problem. Corporates trust its reliability, but its devices are still considered ugly and clunky. The snazzier Blackberry Bold, aimed at consumers, could change this, but so far, RIM hasn't done such a great job with more consumer friendly functions such as music playing.

Some analysts are even predicting that Apple and RIM will emerge as the two dominant players in the smartphone market, passing by Nokia ( NYSE: NOK), which has "failed to capitalize" on its lead, according to Strategy Analytics, Andrew Brown. But Nokia SVP of devices Søren Petersen seems a bit more confident about the company's efforts. He dismissed Blackberry's consumer efforts, telling the FT that "selling to women is about more than making [the phone] pink," which is what RIM had done its Pearl handset. Petersen also waved off iPhone's security and business features as "not worthy of discussion."

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