Since the MC65 sub-community hasn't been setup,, I'm posting this to the ES400 community. We have a last kick at the can for a large opportunity where Intermec had made significant headway with the CN50. And to prepare for this meeting I'm looking for ammunition against the CN50 and we want ot displace it with the MC65. Do we know of customers having challenges with the CN50? For instance, I heard that:
1. When scanning barcodes, CN50 occasionally captures part of the barcode
2. Workaround needed for device to point towards IP address versus DNS name
3. CN50 crashes while running thick .NET application
Please share whatever you have heard about the device and company so it can be brought up for discussion with the customer. Thanks!
6 Replies
Does anyone know if "obsolete-Qualcomm-based-CN50" supports WINS on WAN side? I somewhere heard it does, but it would be good to double check.
Not to get to technical, but the ES400/MC65 architecture employs WAN over NDIS and that is why we have a problem with WINS. It is a combination of Microsoft and Qualcomm shortcomings. For devices that are architected for WAN over PPP, they are not seeing the WINS issue. So if CN50 uses a WAN over PPP architecture, they are likely not seeing the same issue.
We won against the CN50 with different product but it still exposed a dislike, which was the fact that the side trigger buttons had to be remapped (or at least one of them did from memory) to act as triggers, and they required the user to press the rubber quite hard to trigger the scanner. Our trigger buttons were eay to locate and depress without looking at where you were placing your thumb, and they had a positive click response which they liked. Secondly the fact that Motorola has sold more of one product (MC9000) than Intermec has sold of their entire Mobile Computing portfolio, did not fall on deaf ears! Hope these help.
I'd like to thank everyone who responded to my post with competitive info and data around the feature sets of MC65 over the CN50. This was helpful and convincing. However, I do want to inform everyone that Intermec has entered, relative to pricing, into the realm of consumer class devices. Although I don't have an exact figure, a customer who had recently purchased thousands of CN50s implied pricing was that of a high-end consumer phone.
Is Intermec’s strategy not to compete with feature sets but pricing? Sounds as they’re adopting dated technology in their products to drive cost down. Be aware… they liable in doing anything possible to take or buy business.
Just some additional NEGATIVE comments I get from the ground : 1) the look & feel of the MC65 (form factor) - it makes MC65 looks bigger than CN50 2) the WAN antenna -eventhough we know that it's for better signal reception but some just can not accept it 3) CN50 offers extended battery same size as standard battery
This is all probably in the competitive info....but in case it is not It might be worth explaining to the customer that our product is based on a 2nd gen Qualcom platform while the CN50 is based on the first gen platform. In addition to us having a faster processor600MHz vs 520Mhz) the MC65 should have a much longer product life cycle. It is interesting to mote that when Intermec introduced the CN40 they did not use the same platform as the CN50....The CN40 does not have a programmable radio...My guess is that they know the CN50 Qualcomm platform will be EOL soon