The guide to choosing the right phones for your customers small or midsize business

With the right capabilities in hand, your customer’s employees can do better work from anywhere.

The Guide To Choosing The Right Phones

News and analysis about smartphones typically focus on the flash and sizzle of the latest consumer features, but for business decision-makers, there is often an entirely different set of criteria when selecting a device for the workforce. Companies are embracing smartphones and the benefits of mobility, and many see they can no longer depend on employee-owned devices and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies. They know phones are poised to replace laptops as their team’s primary computing devices, and they see the potential value of running their business on mobile applications on a uniform platform they control completely.

In a mature mobile environment, businesses look at smartphones with the same critical eye they bring to other technology assets. They are looking for phones that deliver the most value at the right price point, but they also recognise that overemphasising the initial device price tag can backfire. They want to make smart decisions that preserve capital while enabling business growth and optimising employee productivity.

This guide will help your customers understand device capabilities in a business context. It delves into the business value of capabilities such as battery life, processing power, storage and connectivity, and correlates them to real-world business needs, such as the use of cloud-based apps. It poses questions that will help you choose the phones that best meet their unique needs.

Matching phones and roles

With the rapid evolution of smartphone capabilities, there are now significant variations in performance across the device spectrum. For example, the most powerful phones offer up to 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage, compared to 1.5GB and 16GB, respectively, in a less expensive device. Similar differences can be found in screen size, battery life and processing power, as well as in premium features such as stylus pen and desktop docking.

Of course, a phone’s feature set generally correlates to its price, and businesses can get the best ROI by aligning each phone they buy with the job functions of the employees using the device. Choosing the right phones, however, is not as simple as it might seem to be.

Every buying decision should be generously skewed toward greater device capabilities because the cost/return factors are severely mismatched. Any savings the company achieves from buying a less capable device can be measured in hundreds of pounds, while any persistent productivity declines can quickly cost the business thousands upon thousands of pounds, particularly if they are repeated across multiple employees. A device that jeopardises productivity in any way will cause needless frustration and diminish the potential of your customer’s managers and employees.

Evaluate the demands of each role

An effective decision process should begin with an evaluation of each role’s needs as they pertain to the smartphone. A purchase plan that accounts for the unique needs of each role will result in smart purchases that help each manager and employee optimise their performance, wherever they are working.

Most roles have unique responsibilities to be carried out on smartphones. A heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) technician might use a phone to review equipment manuals and collect customer signatures on work orders. A delivery driver might use the phone to complete forms, geo-stamp locations and collect signatures. A consultant might use the phone to take notes, review presentations and respond to emails.

Some important differentiations jump out right away: Some roles carry a high risk of device damage, some operate in the field for a large part of their day, while other roles may use their phone primarily for calls, messages and emails.

There are also commonalities. Most roles need to run multiple apps simultaneously and/or handle large files, and most employees could see their productivity diminish if their phone was slow or unavailable.

Leverage devices to improve business processes

Many smartphones have speed and storage comparable to laptops, and innovators are finding ways to take advantage of that power. Businesses that want to mobilise core business processes are looking at mobility for important new opportunities. A great example is brick-and-mortar retail, where stores are putting mobile devices in the hands of every store associate to support sales processes that enhance the shopping experience. Similarly, retail bank branches are redesigning customer experiences around mobile so that customers are served quickly with minimal paper form-filling.

As companies plan new phone purchases, they can learn about leading-edge capabilities and leverage them to reimagine business processes. A retail store might be able to eliminate traditional checkout while empowering regional managers to dock their phones in hot desks in every store and move right into a desktop work environment without carrying a laptop computer.

DeX extends your customer’s phone to the desktop

The latest smartphones offer more storage, memory and processing power than many laptops. Samsung’s DeX technology takes full advantage of this by letting users connect their Galaxy device to a monitor, keyboard and mouse for a desktop computing experience. This positions businesses to move beyond “mobile-first” strategy to “mobile-only,” which liberates them from traditional computing constraints and future-proofs the business.

By committing to smartphones as the primary compute devices, your customers can untether employees from desks, cash registers and reception areas and enable more customer-centric workflows. At the same time, they can consolidate their device fleets by eliminating laptops and desktops.

DeX offers significant benefits to the entire company: Managers and employees can go wherever they are needed and travel light, procurement can spend less on hardware, and IT can focus exclusively on mobile computing.

For your customers, ease of use is an important DeX feature. They simply attach their phone to a monitor with a single HDMI adapter and activate DeX mode to turn the smartphone into a desktop workstation that works with a keyboard and a mouse. They can open multiple apps, use keyboard shortcuts and drag and drop files, all on the big screen. If the phone has an S Pen, like the Samsung Galaxy Note20, the phone screen can serve as a pen-enabled touchpad for enhanced precision and functionality. With DeX’s Dual Mode setting, users can watch a video on the monitor while taking notes on the phone screen.

DeX works with most modern Web-based apps and can use virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to bridge the gap to Windows native applications that have not been replaced with mobile equivalents. Business can rely fully on VDI, or only for access to specific applications.

Finally, with the new DeX for PC functionality, workers can also switch seamlessly between their PCs and their smartphones. Give your customer’s employees the ultimate flexibility in how and where they work.

Choosing the right device capabilities

With new iterations every year, smartphones have gained speed, power and added capabilities. Some specifications such as screen size and storage capacity are easy to understand, while others are more esoteric, such as the mAh metric for battery capacity. Once your customer has decided what sort of capabilities it needs in phones and why it is easier to put the technical specifications in context and make educated choices.

Here is an in-depth look at specific smartphone specifications and capabilities. Each section includes questions to help businesses assess the value of that capability to their employees.

Phones must be secure, configurable and manageable.

There is a lot more to running a mobile-first business than just issuing corporate-owned phones. Companies need their phones to be company-customised tools that empower managers and employees to be fast and efficient. The phones also need to be reliably secure and easy to manage, so that IT can easily keep every device profile consistent and up to date.

Samsung phones are uniquely suited for business because they are built on Samsung Knox, which combines powerful device-level security with a suite of management solutions for business. Here is a quick look at how the different elements of Knox meet the needs of growing businesses.

Built-in security

Knox security is designed into Samsung hardware, using a process architecture known as TrustZone, which isolates sensitive computations from all other operations. Data processes are tightly defined to protect against malicious applications, and the device scans itself continuously for inconsistencies.

Custom configuration

With the Knox Configure solution, phones can be configured at deployment to a precise specification designed for the business. Your customers can have their devices configured once or maintain dynamic configuration that allows them to maintain multiple device profiles and update every device as profiles are updated.

Enrollment

Knox Mobile Enrollment enables batch enrollment of phones in an enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution, which prevents the hassle of enrolling phones individually and ensures proper management of the devices from the moment of deployment.

Device management

Knox Manage is Samsung’s cloud-based EMM solution, which empowers your customers IT to implement policies such as application whitelisting and blacklisting and enables the remote management of individual devices.

3. Screen size

When it comes to screen size, bigger is often — but not always — better. Smartphones today come in a range of sizes, from less than 5″. to 6.5″. or more. While an inch may not seem like a big deal, it can make a huge difference for certain users. Smaller devices, on the other hand, have their place for employees who typically use them primarily as communication tools. Smartphones larger than 6″ allow users to more effectively multitask, use a stylus or pen for on-screen note-taking and use productivity apps.
Before your customer buys, think carefully about how their phones will be used, and provide what their employees really need. Some users will benefit more from a large screen that enhances document reading or image viewing. Others may be happy with a smaller device that is easier to handle and pull from their pocket. While big screens often drive up the price, there is an increasing number of mid-range devices that have expansive displays with diminutive price tags.

Beyond 7″ you’re customers are in tablet territory. 4G connected tablets are the best fit for teams that would benefit from more screen real estate. Employees who interact with customers in person — such as salespeople, service workers or customer service personnel — often benefit from devices with large enough screens to share with customers, but not so large that they become unwieldy. Higher-end tablets also have vivid, sharp displays perfect for both video and still images — ideal for executives and salespeople who routinely interact with executives from other companies or high-end customers. A large, bright screen helps them make the right impression.

Along with screen size, increased screen resolution supports improved user experience. Screens are measured in terms of how many pixels they can show and the density of those pixels. Resolution is often expressed with terms such as HD and Quad HD, and these terms have specific numeric values. Entry-level devices typically have HD resolution, which measures 1280×720 pixels. Quad HD+ packs many more pixels on the screen, such as the 3200×1440 pixels on the Samsung Galaxy S20 line. An increase in pixels automatically equates to higher pixel density. The Galaxy S20 offers 563 pixels per inch (ppi), compared to 269 ppi on some entry-level HD screens.