It’s no secret Research In Motion has lost its once-dominant position in the smartphone world. Despite slight increases in sales, BlackBerry market share has plummeted in percentage terms compared to the surging iPhone and Android, falling from 18.7 percent to 11.7 percent in the second quarter. After a recent outage left RIM’s back-end systems inconsistent and unresponsive for parts of four days, we argued that RIM is destined for an eventual demise, hastened by the consumerization of IT. As long as the iPhone and Android are good enough to meet corporate IT requirements, consumer choices will erode RIM’s last area of strength: the enterprise.

But not everyone agrees that RIM’s situation is as dire as it appears on first glance, and indeed some people prefer BlackBerrys. After all, the company has 70 million subscribers. To get a sense of what RIM’s appeal is in the iPhone and Android age, we decided to talk to some users and an enterprise smartphone management vendor that handles mobile deployments of all types. Some of Ars’ Twitter followers told us they only use BlackBerrys because their employers won’t allow other devices, and blamed corporate “inertia.” But it’s also true that some people just prefer the BlackBerry form factor, BlackBerry Messenger is well-liked, and RIM is still ahead of the competition in satisfying the unique requirements of highly regulated industries.

“It’s premature to run the obituaries on RIM,” says Dan Croft, CEO of Mission Critical Wireless, which helps businesses manage mobile deployments. “Clearly they are facing some significant issues, but there are still millions and millions of BlackBerrys out there that are operating just fine. That being said, what we’re typically seeing is not RIM getting ripped out of an enterprise environment. We’re just seeing the addition of non-BlackBerry devices.”

The outage hurts, but IT prefers BlackBerry

Croft tells Ars that he got plenty of calls from customers during this month’s outage. Customers suffered problems for a day to a day and a half, ranging from a full-on outage to slowness. “I just hope it doesn’t happen again and I have to assume RIM is going to need to put in I can’t imagine how many redundant layers to ensure that it doesn’t,” Croft said. While RIM’s connectivity problems will likely increase complaints from end users who want to switch from BlackBerry, Croft believes a huge number of IT shops will stick with RIM, outage or not.

“If it were up to IT managers there would still be only one solution out there and it would be called BlackBerry,” Croft tells Ars.

Why is that? iOS and Android now support encryption, forced PIN entry, remote wipes and other security capabilities, but Croft says RIM security is simply more robust and easier to implement. BlackBerry messages are routed through RIM’s Network Operations Center, and while this produces an extra point of failure, it also adds extra layers of encryption, Croft says. Moreover, he argues that it requires far more planning to set up a proper security system around consumer devices like iPhone and Android than it does with BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

First of all, a surprising number of companies don’t even know what’s on their network in terms of devices and operating systems, he says. Businesses need a good device management system to track what’s running on the network if they want to, say, control which versions of an operating system users run. While consumers were rushing to upgrade their iPhones to iOS 5, a business likely needs 72 hours to test that OS before they can give end users the green light to upgrade.

New features in iOS 5 might be problematic too, specifically iCloud and iMessage, he says. For many businesses, it may not be ok “for you as a user to store corporate data in an Apple cloud that I as a company have no access to,” Croft says. And while iMessage is convenient, “as of now I don’t know any way to archive an iMessage. But I can archive anything on a BlackBerry,” and that’s important for complying with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley. It’s not just existing BlackBerry deployments that are being maintained—Croft says his customers are putting new ones in.

“Surprisingly we are still putting in BlackBerry deployments,” he says. “The two verticals that seem to have a strong interest in maintaining BlackBerry environments and upgrading BlackBerry environments are the financial industry as well as the pharmaceutical industry.”

BlackBerry fans are still out there

While most consumers these days are not buying BlackBerrys, there are still devotees. Gilberto Velasquez, Jr. of the Gilberto Velasquez and Associates marketing firm in Houston boasts “I’m ten times faster on the [BlackBerry] keyboard than anyone on an iPhone will ever be.” Velasquez also prefers the multiple physical buttons, which he says makes it easier to navigate menus and applications. Luckily, Velasquez was unaffected by the outage, but says the highly publicized network problem was “hyper-embarrassing for someone who is a BlackBerry fanatic. This is a situation where the Apple fanboys and girls are going to have a field day.”

Even in Velasquez’s own business, there are multiple types of devices in use. Instead of having a BES set up for a small staff, they use a mix of BlackBerrys, Androids, and iPhones. Velasquez said in an interview that he is more impressed by Android tablets than the PlayBook, but when it comes to a phone, he owns the BlackBerry Torch, the one with a touchscreen and slide-out keyboard. He’s also helped clients roll applications out to BlackBerry users for marketing campaigns. One reason he prefers BlackBerry over iOS is the ability to install applications from third-party sources, as opposed to being restricted to what’s in BlackBerry App World. “I don’t need oversight over what I want to put on my device,” he says. While Android offers that flexibility too, Velasquez swears by RIM’s technical expertise.

“This is the company that brought push e-mail and the concept of data streaming to these devices,” he says. “They know what they’re doing.” But Velasquez does think that RIM became complacent because of its leading market position, falling behind Apple, and that the PlayBook tablet isn’t that compelling. But when it comes down to it, Velasquez says the iPhone is a toy and BlackBerry is a tool that’s appropriate for business use.

Wanting an iPhone, but thwarted by corporate policy

Another longtime BlackBerry user we spoke with became a RIM fan 10 years ago, when he received his first BlackBerry for work. “There wasn’t anything like that before,” says Dominic, who prefers that his full name be kept private because he works for a big-name, multinational technology vendor. “Having your own little device you could check e-mail on was pretty amazing. It made you feel elite.”

Back then, Dominic was a BES, systems, and database administrator for a small company that was later purchased by his current employer. Now working as an Oracle database administrator, Dominic says he wants an iPhone, but his employer has still not declared it safe for business, and he’d prefer not to carry two phones around. “The kind of control they want over corporate e-mail is not just like anti-virus. If an employee leaves, they need to be able to shut them down immediately,” he tells Ars.

The iPhone hasn’t made it out of the pilot stage at his company yet. “If I had to guess, I’d say the reason it’s taking so long is they must be writing their own software to have that level of control over the iPhone,” Dominic says. With RIM, “the encryption methods are better than anything anyone else has,” he says. “It’s the reason governments are still using them.”

Dominic uses the Torch these days, and says the design is nice “but you don’t get a lot of applications that I find particularly interesting. It doesn’t compare very well to Android and iPhone.” He went a couple of hours without e-mail during the outage, but says "considering that this is only the third outage in 10 years, I thought it was a bit sloppy of RIM but I didn't consider it a big deal."

Although Dominic admits to being lured by the consumer appeal of the iPhone, he thinks RIM’s best bet is to double down on what they’re really good at: satisfying corporate and government requirements. RIM shouldn’t ignore consumer features, such as the planned support for Android applications on RIM devices, “but I think they should not make such a big deal of that, personally,” because competing on consumer features makes BlackBerrys look poor by comparison, Dominic says. If successful, RIM could survive in a scaled-down version of its current self, he thinks.

RIM struggling in the face of consumer preferences

Even Croft, who warned us not to sign RIM’s death warrant just yet, acknowledges that the company is struggling to maintain its position in the face of a large-scale shift in consumer preferences.

“Clearly, what’s driving iOS and Android devices is a better user experience when it comes to the device itself,” says Croft, who uses multiple devices including a BlackBerry. “There’s absolutely no denying that.”

RIM recently announced BBX, its next-generation operating system for both smartphones and tablets. BlackBerry fans hope that RIM can hold on to the enterprise and win over some new fans while they wait.