Galen Gruman

When it comes to business mobile usage, Apple reigns. That's according to Good Technology, an MDM (mobile device management) vendor that tracks the activation of new devices managed by its customers. It's no surprise that in the fourth quarter of 2011, Apple iPhone 4S activations were huge at 31 percent of all new devices activated and 40 percent of all new smartphones, as that highly anticipated smartphone was released in October.

But Apple products, not just the iPhone 4S, took all five top spots in Good's list of most activated devices: the iPhone 4S at 31 percent, the iPhone 4 at 18 percent, the iPad 2 at 14 percent, the original iPad at 4 percent, and the iPhone 3G S at 3 percent. The rest of the top 10 were Android smartphones: the Samsung Galaxy S II, Motorola Droid Bionic, Motorola Droid 3, HTC Evo 4G, and Motorola Droid X2 -- each at 2 percent or less.

When it debuted in 2008, the BlackBerry Bold quickly achieved iconic status as the must-have executive smartphone, with a QWERTY keyboard that made emails a snap. Not four years later, the Bold is struggling to remain relevant, as its creator Research in Motion tries to reinvent itself with a new OS to replace the BlackBerry platform that once defined mobile computing. The BlackBerry Bold 9000 series is the end of the line for the BlackBerry we all knew.

When it debuted this past fall, the Bold 9900 switched to a touchscreen (thus the common moniker "Bold Touch") in an attempt to appeal to a market that had gone gaga over the iPhone and Android family. But the Bold Touch retained its QWERTY keyboard; RIM addressed those who wanted an onscreen-only keyboard with a revamped BlackBerry Torch model. When you get right down to it, the BlackBerry Bold is pretty much a BlackBerry Bold -- it's not a major departure from the once-iconic device's history, which may explain why it has struggled in the marketplace.

As soon as September, we may see the first smartphones based on Microsoft's Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" release, the OS update with what CEO Steve Ballmer says has more than 500 new features. The first version of Windows Phone 7 had a compelling UI but fell far short of the iPhone and even Android devices in many areas critical to business users. It was a flop in the market, but Microsoft asked everyone to give it a second chance. "Mango" is that second chance, and Microsoft sent the final "reboot" OS to smartphone makers a month ago.

Does "Mango" address the many gaps in the first version of Windows Phone 7? It's hard to say, as working versions of the OS are not yet available for people like me to test. And although Microsoft has been dribbling out information for months on "Mango," there's little meaningful detail yet -- especially on the core business capabilities that the first version lacked. When I asked Microsoft for what "Mango" added for business users, it was unable to tell me, pointing me instead to a vapid blog entry that said nothing about business. The improvements Microsoft has focused on publicly tend to fall into two camps: social applications and information sharing.

Investment banking firm Jefferies stated the obvious this week when it issued a report predicting that iOS and Mac OS X will be one operating system by 2016. Nearly a year ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that was his goal in what I playfully dubbed his MiOS strategy. Jobs had just previewed Mac OS X Lion, touting the user interface capabilities it was borrowing from iOS. The forthcoming iOS 5 also takes some UI concepts first released in Lion, but as I'm under NDA with Apple, I can't tell you which ones.

At the same time Apple released its long-awaited Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (in a first, via online-only distribution), the tech giant also updated two of its Macintosh computers to include the Thunderbolt external bus technology that provides transfer rates of up to 10Gbps and supports storage, network, and video connections. The MacBook Air slim laptop and the Mac Mini small-footprint desktop both now come with Thunderbolt. The MacBook Pro and iMac were released with Thunderblt ports earlier this year. Only the Mac Pro ships without Thunderbolt.

The Air also comes with a backlit keyboard, a feature dropped in the MacBook Air release of last fall. Both the MacBook Air and Mac Mini also sport Intel Core i5 and i7 processors, depending on the configuration, providing what Apple says are significant speed increases of about 200 percent. The graphics processors have also been updated with faster versions.

It's no longer a question of whether your business will support tablets and smartphones. And at most organizations, it's no longer a question of whether you'll support multiple mobile OSes. The question is, which mobile OSes can you support?

I've put together a table of what the mainstream mobile OSes supports for security and management, so you can tell quickly which platforms offer the fundamental capabilities you require.

New data from Gartner and IDC show that sales of Macs in the United States have crossed the 10 percent threshold -- which hasn't happened since 1991, when Macs accounted for 11.2 percent of all U.S. PC sales. In the second quarter of 2011 (April through June), IDC reports that Macs accounted for 10.7 percent of PC sales -- up from 9 percent a year earlier -- making Apple the third-largest seller of PCs after Hewlett-Packard (26.3 percent) and Dell (22.2 percent). Gartner's figures also put the Mac market share at 10.7 percent and had Apple moving into the third-highest sales slot.

The hype starts today, so watch out. Microsoft formally launched the long-promised Office 365 set of cloud services for using Microsoft Office, Exchange, Lync (for voice and video communications), and SharePoint in the cloud, available in a variety of subscription options. Even before the formal release today, Microsoft had been marketing Office 365 via emails advertising its capabilities. If you got that ad, you no doubt saw how iPhones, iPads, BlackBerrys, and Android devices (and Macs) were all noted as compatible in the sales pitch for Exchange capabilities. You then saw in the rest of the promo Microsoft touting the rest of Office 365's features' mobile compatibility.

Here's the catch: The Office 365 ad doesn't specifically claim that non-Windows platforms are supported beyond Exchange; it instead switches to the generic word "mobile" in the descriptions of its other capabilities so that you infer that it does. Don't be fooled.

The first Chromebooks, from Samsung and Acer, are finally starting to ship, after a six-month tease by Google for its foundational Chrome OS. (Samsung's white 3G model is now shippng, and its three other models and Acer's sole models are available for preorder.) Please, save youself $350 to $500 and avoid these cloud-only laptops. Spend your money on something you'll both use and enjoy, like an iPad 2 or Galaxy Tab 10.1. I write these words from a Chromebook, where my 802.11n network feels like it's traversing molasses when using Google Docs and other Internet service.

The sad truth is that the Chrome OS vision of all your computing occuring through the Internet is an unsatisfying reality. I've tried to be open to the idea and given the beta Chrome OS the benefit of doubt in its early versions. But as the ship date approached, I began to get nervous that Google couldn't take Chrome OS beyond being an awkward sub-OS.

Users and business managers alike are loving the iPad as a potential laptop replacement, for at least part of the time. And more and more workplaces are providing employees iPads or letting employees use their own. So, just as companies typically install a suite of desktop productivity apps (nearly always Microsoft Office), what should the iPad equivalent be?

The answer can't be Office because Microsoft has no iPad-compatible suite. Microsoft's Office Web Apps cloud-based suite doesn't work on an iPad either. Google Docs is also not easily usable on an iPad, despite some improvements in winter 2011.