Five Best Business Smartphones

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Brigades of hard-charging office workers were the first to adopt the smartphone and help create the category. With their Palm(PALM) Treos and early BlackBerries from Research In Motion(RIMM), business users ushered in the era of mobile email. That technology soon evolved toward the mass market mobile Internet that today is led by Apple's(AAPL) iPhone and Google's(GOOG) Android devices.

During the rise, RIM built an empire on enterprise devices that has effectively locked other players outside of the corporate firewall.

But a new generation of phones, characteristically controlled by fingertip gestures on big touchscreens, is out to crush the BlackBerry.

Here's a look at the five top business phone makers and where they fit in the organizational chart.

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