The days when business mobiles were status symbols are over. They’re now working machines, required to conduct real business, and in some cases even carry out physical sales business. The result has been that the business community has become very demanding about the quality of their phones.

The market is now getting hit with a series of new demands:

• Better mobile plans- A new species of mobile phone brokers is helping businesses to find better plans. This is driving competition and it’s also driving a move to much simpler, far more cost-effective plans. Flat rates are becoming a popular approach, and major carriers and suppliers are now trying to get these plans on to the market ASAP.

• Functionality- Smart phones are now expected to be extremely smart, able to do a lot of things as baseline platforms. This trend is being further developed by new technology which is driving a truly vast range of new functions. The business phone is required to do presentations, act as a working mobile office, and even carry out credit card transactions.

• Upgradability- Not surprisingly, businesses want phones that can keep up with the new technology with no fuss. Phones are now getting the same sort of demand as computers, and they’re rapidly becoming de facto computers for a lot of operations.

The technical environment- Getting serious about apps

The “app for everything” cliché has met an unimpressed public and an even more unimpressed business community, looking for functionality and finding a truly horrendous, disorganized mess varying from quite good applications to pitiful things that are more insulting than useful.

If you’ve read some of the reviews of apps on Google and Apple’s apps stores, you’ll see a lot of criticism. You can find apps for tying neckties, and apps which are basically “organizers”, among the advanced, high value “Return on Investment” commercial apps and other serious business apps.

The fact is that business mobile phones are rapidly becoming much more than phones in the conventional sense. The technology required by business is also now core business technology, so the dissatisfaction with amateurish apps is pretty understandable. Things are improving for business largely thanks to this strongly consumer-driven market.

Getting fussy pays off

If you’re looking for business phone plans and technology, the new market is a good guide to the standards now expected of business phone plans and technology.

The new business mode is fussy and it’s centred on these issues:

Cost- Even big suppliers like Vodaphone are now offering multi-phone, flat rate, highly flexible plans. These are likely to be the baseline business plans for the future, and competition will provide much better deals in future.

Technology– New phones are coming with more technology and functionality built in, and these phones are providing high value returns as working business operations.

When you’re looking for a business mobile plan, get fussy. Compare plans using a mobile phone broker, and look for obvious business values in every aspect of the plan. You’ll find you do get what you want.