Just In Case You Hadn't Heard, These "Cases" Aren't Cutting It: Why Many Companies Are Dropping Apple For Android

Smartphone and tablet cases abound. We buy sleek, beautifully executed smartphones for our personal use, then cover them up with a “protective” case. Some cases offer moderate protection, although most of them have only minimal value and are selected to differentiate your phone. We tell ourselves that we’ve protected this $700 purchase from our clumsy selves, but what we’ve mostly “protected” was the profit margin of the retailer.

So, go ahead, encase your mobile device in an off-the-shelf “shell”. Just don’t make the mistake of feeling free of the consequences. Even the most “rugged” tablet and handheld cases leave your valuable device vulnerable to internal damage from drops, bumps, vibrations and extreme temperatures, among other hazards. That’s why consumer devices, including all Apple products and most Android products, are non-starters for use in field service environments. And that’s not even considering the OS limitations for mobile management, where Android and Windows offer a much richer set of capabilities than Apple. At least not in real world scenarios like this, this or this.

As discussed recently in Field Technologies Online, Apple fans are typically hard core advocates for iPads in the workplace. The problem is that there isn’t a way to justify the cost and hassle of managing the much more fragile and I/O-limiting devices in mobile business environments. In fact, no one has been able to crack the business case for non-rugged devices, period, because there isn’t a good one. Though Apple loyalists may protest that, saying that with the right protective case, an iPad can fare “well enough” in the field, the reality is that they typically fail fast for one reason or another. This isn’t a newly-realized notion either.