NTSB Dumps BlackBerry In Favor of iPhone 5

Nerval's Lobster writes "The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) plans on replacing its existing stock of BlackBerry devices with Apple's iPhone 5. Research In Motion's BlackBerry smartphones, the government entity wrote in a Nov. 13 notice of intent, 'have been failing both at inopportune times and at an unacceptable rate.' The NTSB's use of iPads means it has the operational support for iOS; consequently, the decision was made to go with Apple. 'The iPhone 5 has been determined to be the only device that meets the dual requirement of availability from the existing wireless vendor and is currently supportable by existing staff resources,' the notice added. RIM is fighting to retain the government and enterprise contracts that originally made it such a mobile powerhouse. If agencies and boards such as the NTSB begin to embrace alternative platforms, however, that could critically weaken RIM's business model just as the company attempts a comeback behind the upcoming BlackBerry 10 platform."

How *do* you compare server side failure rates?

[accessbob]

BlackBerry allows fine granularity in managing devices, and covers much more than just email accounts. Is that even possible with an iPhone? Is it possible to do a like-for-like comparison?

Also, if their BES is failing, wouldn't that be the NTSB's own hardware? The BES software will be running on NTSB hardware for security reasons won't it?

It all sounds like BS by someone who wants a shiny new iPhone 5 free from the government. But that's now how government contracts are supposed to be awarded....

How

[prelelat]

Can someone explain to me how these organizations manage to manage all of these apple devices? I mean with BB enterprise you can push and pull apps, wipe the phone and all kinds of stuff remotely.

In the classroom(I do IT for schools) with a microsoft tablet I can join it to the domain and set policies. once again I can push out applications and everything like a normal windows computer. The functionality on the IT department means that they are much easier to manage in both cases. It's gotten to the point that my department will refuse to configure 100+ ipads for a school because doing things like maintaining apps is an impossible waste of time. How are these large organizations doing it? How are they managing security with encryption? Is this safe?

If you know I would like to know how because I would love to present it to the other staff.

Re:Not ruggedized.

[ImprovOmega]

That, and you can programatically set up the native iOS e-mail application vs. Android that makes you either purchase a third party app (Touchdown is especially popular, and $20) or manually configure the native e-mail app. Samsung is attempting to fix this with the enterprise initiative codenamed S.A.F.E. but unfortunately that will only fix the issue for late-model Samsung devices.