Rage against souped-up cell phones
Does your small business really need a cell phone with James Bond type surveillance capabilities?
Sometimes all you need to do is call someone.
Cell phones are becoming so complicated these days, just calling a business contact takes a bunch of strokes, beyond just dialing the number. And I keep hitting the stupid speaker button on my iPhone with my cheek, allowing everyone near me at the supermarket to hear my conversation while I’m ordering cold cuts.
Small business owners must be at their wits end when it comes to all the options cell phones offer these days. What’s right for your business? Is it worth getting 3-D maps, or voice controls, or GPS?
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| Dirk Lammers / AP |
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These are just a few of the new options phones are starting to offer,
according to a Wall Street Journal story that ran this week.
But it got me thinking about whether having a phone with a nannycam is really something any business needs.
Small business owners have to ask themselves what they and their employees will be using their phones for, says Camille Hamilton, owner of
CMIT Solutions, an IT professional service provider to the SMB segment.
Sounds logical.
“Do you really need all these bells and whistles? Probably not,” she maintains. “If you have an employee who just needs to call clients then a basic phone with a good connection is enough.”
To Hamilton the coverage and the cost of cell phones plans is a top priority.
And, she adds, think of cell phones as disposable because few people hold onto them today for years, and employees often lose them. That means you want to pay as little as possible for the best phone that works for your business.
Many of her clients are small firms that have three to 30 employees and many of these entrepreneurs are making cell phone purchase decisions “haphazardly and not sitting down and looking at how it fits into the entire tech environment.”
So, forget about the cell phone hype, and think about what you need, she stresses. If you run a construction company, for example, you may want to get the most durable phones on the market so they survive when an employee throws the phone in the back of a pick up truck.
If you’ve got delivery or sales people on the road, then GPS enabled phones are probably a good call.
As for Internet, in most cases you and your employees probably don’t have to be surfing the web when you’re out on the road.
Hamilton has Internet capability on her Blackberry, which her husband calls her Crack-berry, but she admits the only thing she’s used it for lately is getting sports scores and keeping on top of the political race.
