Woolworths, the largest supermarket chain in Australia are ditching the Blackberry phones used by their staff, in favour of the Apple iPhone. Woolworth's head of customer technology Chris Stanley said that the staff would receive new iPhones shortly. The Australian.com.au wrote a detailed report on the change over.

This blow is yet another kick in the teeth for Research In Motion who are suffering from competition from Apple and Google OS smartphones. Woolworths in Australia are replacing the 700 handsets in favour of Apple's latest iPhone.

IBM and Qantas in Australia have recently adopted the same strategy – dumping Blackberry smartphones in favour of the iPhone. IBM Australia said that it would stop purchasing RIM devices in a move to save $1.4 million a year. Qantas said they were dropping 1,300 Blackberry handsets to save the airline millions of dollars every year.

Dell also said they were replacing more than half of their corporate Blackberry fleet with 15,000 phones from other companies.

Woolworths in August adopted 890 iPads to its store managers at the national conference in Sydney.

Woolworths in Australia said that the move to iPhone would save the company 20 percent of costs associated with maintaining Blackberry systems, including the cost of servers. Apple do not charge for connecting iPhones to Microsoft Exchange server.

Kitguru says: Another blow for Research In Motion.

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