Austrian Postal Service drops iPhones for 1,200 Windows Phones

Austrian site Futurezone.at reports that the Austrian Postal Service will very soon move from Apple smartphones to Windows Phones for their enterprise needs.

The service will be dropping their iPhone 4 handsets, which are presumably coming to end of life, and adopting Nokia Lumia 630 and 930 handsets.

"The costs were one of many aspects of the change," explains Philipp Teper, spokesman for the organization.

"The goal is a uniform standard for hardware and software and a seamless integration of all mobile devices," he continued, suggesting more Microsoft products may be on the way.

While some may be surprised by the move,  Bela Virag, telecommunications analyst at at the consulting firm Arthur D. Little was not, saying:"Microsoft intensively observed the business customer market and knows him well. The overarching solutions of the group is covered well in the B2B area." Apple, he continued was a "classic B2C companies", that will never offer 100% of what business customers require.

Virag noted that Microsoft has caught up with Apple over the last 3 years with its phone and Surface products and while Microsoft has continued to innovate, Apple has not.

"Apple has stopped in terms of server, database infrastructure and developer environments on a level. I can understand why the Postal Service turned away and turned to Microsoft", he said.

The new Lumia handsets are expected to hit the road in Austria in mid-November.