Using Android for Business

For the last 5 years the Blackberry phones have been synonymous with business and there is not a city worker worth their salt who would be without their trusty Blackberry – even the current President of America, Barack Obama is a self confessed Blackberry addict. But with the rise of Android and the innovation the open platform brings, is it about time businesses review their love affair with the Blackberry?

Blackberry’s leading feature is the ease at which it syncs up your email with your phone. With a data plan you can send and receive emails as quickly and easy as sending a text message and with the ‘push’ feature your phone automatically retrieves your newest emails. But hang on a second, if an Android phone can do all this and give you the choice of application, style, functionality and features, doesn’t it make the Blackberry’s party piece somewhat redundant? With so many email applications for the Android you can choose one that suits your requirements rather than letting Blackberry decide how to handle email for you.

Many businesses are moving to the cloud based model where everything is stored in datacenters and information is accessed as it is needed from where ever you are. At the forefront of this is Google with their multiple services ranging from contacts to word processing and many large enterprises are even using Google’s Gmail email service, replacing their old Windows Exchange servers. An Android comes tightly integrated with many of Google’s apps like email, contacts, documents, maps and more which means that all the information that you have on the PC in the office is accessible at a touch of a button on the Android phone. Need to find the contact details of a client? No problem, it’s a click away in your Google address book.

Think about how much a lost smartphone would cost the business. All your contacts, all your messages and all your saved files could be irreplaceable but with the Android’s syncing ability your Google accounts, no emails need to be lost, contacts are saved to the cloud and Google Docs can be accessed from anywhere – suddenly the cost of losing or damaging the phone is limited to the cost of the device itself.

The smartphone of today needs to let the business person perform all the functions they would normally need a PC for. If they are on the way to a client meeting and need to make some last minute adjustments to the presentation they would normally need to carry a heavy laptop. The Android phone can eliminate this requirement by letting the user create, edit and view common office documents on their phone and make adjustments where necessary. The built in WiFi and Bluetooth capability makes it simple to transfer any edited files to a PC or another device at the touch of the button.

While we’re on the subject of travelling to a client meeting, how many of us have a sat-nav device in our car now? If you do the question is: why? An Android phone has a built in GPS and using apps like Google maps or a navigation app, you can find the route to the clients office directly on your phone.

The Android is the perfect business smartphone and an ideal all-in-one replacement for a laptop, sat-nav and PDA.