Will Apple iPhone's "greatest show on Earth" sway Research in Motion (RIM) BlackBerry's business faithful? Hint: Bet on the BlackBerry for business.

Sure, the iPhone's browser bailiwick and coolness factor will appeal to slick, image-conscious execs. Yet the vast majority of the business segment proper won't give up their BlackBerrys -- which have pretty much become a lifeline to their jobs -- anytime soon.

After all, it's only business.

"People who carry the BlackBerry are not in it for the thrill," says InfoWorld chief technology analyst Tom Yager. "The BlackBerry is boring next to the iPhone, but it is the quintessential, always-connected messaging device. Its operation is second nature to professionals, and you can trace that objective back 10 years to its original design."

Put aside, for now, the back-end stuff such as security, support, management, wireless carriers, and even price -- real people choose mobile devices based on personal preferences, not necessarily IT policies. And BlackBerry's signature user-oriented features have become part and parcel to the way people work every day: push messaging, apps running in the background, always-on instant messaging, and, of course, the venerable and practical hardware keyboard for serious and, at times, lengthy correspondence that needs to happen, well, now. In contrast, the iPhone's touch keyboard has been criticized for being unwieldy for such typing correspondence.

So the real question is this: Can the iPhone compete against BlackBerry's messaging strengths?

The BlackBerry's messaging advantage

In the United States, the BlackBerry reigns among business users -- but the race is just starting to heat up. A Forrester Research survey released last week showed that smartphones -- which includes the BlackBerry, iPhone, Nokia's E-series, and Palm's Treo -- are making their way into the hands of employees at a rapid rate. The number of employees using smartphones is expected to double to 82 per cent in 2013.

The BlackBerry stole execs' hearts with its push messaging many moons ago. Even captains of industry went on record saying they'd be lost without their BlackBerry's incessant and familiar buzzing. Last week, Apple touted the same push feature in iPhone 2.0. A major coup? Depends on how you define push messaging.

The first iPhone could check for new e-mail only every 15 minutes or other user-designated interval; but when it ships in July, the iPhone 2.0 software will give both iPhone 3G and current iPhone (as well as iPod Touch) devices push-messaging capabilities via a back-end Microsoft system. The problem, says Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney, is that it won't be perfect.

"I'll use an [existing] Microsoft device as an example," Dulaney says. "Say you get a partial download of a message, and so you scroll down and try to get the rest of the message. It can take 20 seconds, but with RIM, it's instant. RIM has very granular control of e-mail."

RIM achieves this thanks to its own network, which Apple doesn't have. "You can't have push without a proprietary network that gives you a presence in real time and lets inbound messages float around in the ether until it sees you're able to receive it," Yager explains.

In fact, Apple had to create its own version of a piece of BlackBerry's infrastructure -- a proprietary notification service -- to make push messaging work in iPhone 2.0, Yager says.