Executive Summary

We handpicked four of today's hottest smartphones—the Nokia E62, RIM's BlackBerry Pearl 8100, the T-Mobile Dash, and Palm's Treo 750—to judge how well they satisfy the needs of IT executives and business users. While each has compelling business-oriented features, your budget and project schedule probably limits you to one. See which phone gets our nod.

We set five main criteria in examining smartphones appropriate for corporate deployment or personal business purposes: phone features (including voice quality), Web access, e-mail and messaging options (with associated security safeguards), productivity applications and battery life.

The BlackBerry Pearl and Treo 750 offer the best phone feature sets of the devices we reviewed. On top of basic phonebook functionality, both the Pearl and Treo 750 have easy-to-use voice dialing options and simple one-button access to contact lists. The Treo also offers a cool option that lets you ignore a phone call and reply with a text message—with only two clicks from its home screen. We liked the Treo 750's touch screen and stylus combination best for typing messages or entering Web addresses, but the Nokia E62 was the most functional for typing via keyboard.

As far as voice quality goes, the Treo 750 consistently provided the clearest call quality, with the Nokia E62 close behind. On calls from the Houston and Boston areas, the Treo sounded crisp and clean with little feedback. The Nokia E62 also had great call quality from the Chicago and Boston areas, but we noticed a slight buzz whenever we used the device for an extended period of time.

The Treo 750 is the only phone we reviewed that is a true 3G device. Because it accesses Cingular's GSM/Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) network, average download speeds are 220Kbps to 320Kbps. Cingular's UMTS network offers data transfer speeds that can double those available via Cingular's or T-Mobile's EDGE network. Though we didn't find the Treo's data transfer speeds to be far speedier than those available via EDGE, it was clearly faster, particularly when accessing sites with minimal graphics or images. We also liked that the Treo lets you place a phone call when browsing the Web, and send e-mail while on a call.

On the Web side, our favorite is the Nokia E62's default HTML 4, WAP 2.0 Nokia S60 browser. The application has unique features we took a liking to, including a cursor that lets you click anywhere on a webpage, and a "back" function that displays tiny screenshots of your last viewed pages.

For organizations that already have a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), the Pearl is (unsurprisingly) easiest to get up and running on corporate networks. If you've standardized on Microsoft Exchange Server, both the Treo 750 and T-Mobile Dash will be the simplest choice (though you may need to upgrade your Exchange Server for the coolest features to work). However, the device with the most out-of-the-box options for corporate e-mail and calendar setup is the Nokia E62, no matter which mail server your organization employs; it has multiple methods of linking to Outlook or Lotus Notes accounts, via its Mail for Exchange, BlackBerry Connect, Cingular Xpress Mail and Good Mobile Messaging solutions.

The security safeguards for smartphone users rely heavily on the enterprise mail server and other infrastructure. A variety of security options are available to BlackBerry users with the appropriate BES in use, including safeguards to disable, say, the digital camera on the Pearl. The T-Mobile Dash and the Palm Treo 750 run on the Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system, and rely largely on Microsoft's Messaging and Security Feature Pack and Microsoft Exchange to set security policies.

Our top choice for office productivity tools is the Nokia E62, as it enables users to view Word and Excel documents, PowerPoint presentations and PDFs. E62 users can also edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files; it is, in fact, the only device we reviewed with PowerPoint-editing functionality.

The battery lives vary widely. At the top of the list was the Nokia E62 with a whopping 12 hours and 45 minutes talk time, followed by the T-Mobile Dash, which clocked in at nearly 11 hours of talk time. The Pearl also had impressive talk time, at just under eight hours and 30 minutes, while the Palm Treo had a meager three hours and 30 minutes.

While your personal needs and your company's deployment concerns will vary, if we had to vote with our own checkbooks for a business-class smartphone, the Treo 750 is our winner, with the Nokia E62 just a notch behind. Typing functionality, voice quality and Web features are arguably a smartphone's most important features. For us, what sets the Treo 750 apart from the others are its touch screen and stylus, high voice quality and 3G capabilities. You can type messages faster and hear calls better, as well as access webpages and download files more easily and in less time than any other device we evaluated. It's that simple. The E62's full qwerty keyboard was its main draw, and if we preferred to type with a keyboard instead of a stylus, we would've been hard put to pick a victor—though the E62's large size would have helped. The Treo 750's weak battery life will certainly scare off some users, but we're willing to carry around an extra battery and charger in exchange for the above-mentioned benefits.

Read the full reviews for the reasoning behind our decisions.

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