Battery-life management
The battery systems within handhelds vary greatly. This is something to which you must pay close attention. The key question, of course, is what happens when the handheld runs out of juice?

Does the handheld go to sleep softly? Or does it suffer complete state breakdown and data loss, destined for the IT center for another round of set-up?

Battery management is a major cost contributor to the repair and IT costs of a handheld. And let's not even think about the business impact of the user's lost data.

Knowing your user community
Is your mobile solution going into the hands of techno nerds, eager for their next technology fix? Or is the mobile solution going to be used by the technology timid? The handheld device, operating system and application software must be selected to accommodate the audience of the mobile solution.

Vendors' approaches to usability differ greatly, so test them all out on your user audience. If you do so, you'll realize a lower TCO through decreased training costs, technical support calls, and "false" repair depot submissions.

Roll 'em out!
The process of readying a handheld for first-time deployment, again, differs between handhelds. Make sure that you are familiar with the handheld set-up process and the ease or difficulty with which operating system and software updates can be loaded into the handheld and configured.

Set-up time for a handheld can vary from 10 minutes to 4 hours, depending on the mobile solution, selected handheld, and selected operating system. Set-up time can be a significant cost in the TCO equation.

This is particularly the case when combined with a weak recovery scenario from a drained battery. A given handheld can be back in the "shop" repeatedly for set-up.

Robustness of software
Software maintenance and update management on an army of deployed handhelds can be significant. If the software -- either the operating system or the software application -- is regularly morphing to accommodate bugs and performance problems, your IT team will have to call in the troops for OS and application updates 3-4 times per year. So choose wisely!

Minimize the times per year that your IT team has touch each handheld. Coordinating OS and software application updates will lower the TCO nut even further.

Training: It's a good thing!
Many companies view training to be an unnecessary activity for a mobile solution. The feeling is that the handheld is intuitive. Give the user 10 minutes poking and prodding at the functions and s/he will eventually figure it out.

However, with the growing complexity and sophistication of handhelds and the software that runs on them, this is just asking for trouble ... and cost. An untrained user usually only knows enough to get by; a good portion of the OS and application is uncharted territory.

Such users are much more likely to make an operational error that can result in loss of set-up information and data. Such users are also much more likely to get themselves in a pickle and not know how to back out of a cascading screen path for which they have no idea how they got there!