Are you issued a Blackberry or other cell phone for your job?

J_86

My own phone that I pay for, but we get a 22% discount on monthly service. I rarely get work calls after hours, so it works out in my favor.

The last company I worked for provided me a phone because we would get tickets dispatched to us via SMS.

crrussell3

We all had Blackberry but have since moved on to Android/iPhone once our contracts expired. I had a BB Storm II but now have a HTC Thunderbolt. All paid for by the company of course.

veritas_libertas

I have a BB and it's reimbursed. I actually like the BB Bold, but it's no iPhone that's for sure.

ptilsen

Just to clarify, I loved my BBs, and I still miss my Bold sometimes. But they were slow, inconsistent, often inelegant, and lacked features I've come to take for granted. I still miss the keyboard.

Sponx

IT and upper management are usually given a BlackBerry (unfortunately), however with our new BYOD program you can utilize a Samsung based Android phone, or an iPhone 4+ with a corporate stipend per month.

lunchbox67

I am assigned a BlackBerry ... hate it ... company is now rolling out IPhones ... I will hate it too but not as much ... getting it next week sometime.

I am not on call but have to be reachable ... just lawyer BS to get around lawyer BS ...

DevilWAH

most of the department have Blackberries, but I dont see any reason to have two phones.

My personal phone has unlimited call and data plan in it. So I chose to have all calls forwarded to it, get access to work email on it. Why would any one want two phones?

Akaricloud

DevilWAH wrote: »

Why would any one want two phones?

I don't want to carry my work around with me all the time, my personal phone has content
on it unsuitable for the work place, I don't like the idea of having to give up my device(and possibly number) when I leave the company, the network we're on doesn't work well at my house, ect ect.

There are many valid reasons to keep them separate. I've watched my company take and go through people's phones during investigations and it really illustrates the point that it's the company's device to do what they want with period.

XiaoTech

Company I work for specializes in providing the BYOD service...so everyone has their own device. Active sync, no plans. Although I think it's going to change later on for people that are on call. Personally, email is not on any of my devices. Once I leave work, that's the end of it. My first few months I put email on my devices, and tested out a few mdms...Good, Mobile Iron, Airwatch....just to know how they work. But no way I would ever want to keep those things on my own personal device. Gives too much power to the employer. If I ever work somewhere that needs me to be on call, they better provide me a phone. Nothing is going on my personal device outside of testing a new MDM (Mobile Device Management software).

ptilsen

I carried two BlackBerries, a BB (personal) and an iPhone (work), then two iPhones. Now I have two iPhones again. I think I want to go back to just one phone, but there are big advantages to having two phones. I can ignore random numbers on my personal phone, while I need to answer my work phone. I can also be sure I keep contacts and calendar items in the right accounts so my coworkers don't see my personal calendar items and I don't accidentally add my personal contacts to Exchange instead of Gmail or Yahoo. I have three email accounts on my personal phone, but it is not the end of the world if I mix up their contacts since they're all personal. With work it is frustrating, and I had to do a bunch of shuffling when I left my last job because of this. I had accidentally added half a dozen personal contacts to my work Exchange and work contacts to Gmail.

I will say that iOS keeps getting better and better at unified contact management with multiple sync'ed accounts. For any contacts I have in multiple accounts, it becomes really easy to get them linked and avoid duplicates. And I can do multiple ActiveSync accounts to sync everything. I have Gmail (personal), Hotmail/Live (school) and Exchange (work) all fully sync'ed with ActiveSync. It's nice to keep the work phone on work, but iOS is almost good enough that I don't need to.

BlackBerry 10 will have a "dual profile" feature that helps segregate everything work from everything else, even permitting the organization to remotely wipe just the work portion or do other policies on it. It's actually extremely attractive to me and could really help RIM back on the BYOD and mobility bandwagons. I think Apple may follow suit, at which point we'll start seeing the vast majority of organizations offering cell phone stipends or issued cell phones.