The government chooses iPhone. Because its cheaper.

This is one agency, not a big one, making one decision, not a strategic one, to provide smartphones to staffers, not many.

But, good Lord, this is exactly the kind of press that makes Apple go even higher and just the kind of thing to send RIM employees leaping out their windows, or searching for jobs selling Xerox copiers to small businesses in Guelph.

And it is a sign of things to come.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a U.S. federal agency that studies climate and the environment, plans to replace some of its employees' BlackBerrys with Apple iPhones and get rid of the servers that power RIM's smartphones by June.

"It all comes down to economics," Joe Klimavicz, NOAA's chief information officer, said in a phone interview on Friday. "I've got a lot of pressure to cut our operating costs."

RIM charges a fee for use of its servers and data centers, which compress and encrypt email and other sensitive data. The company's early success was due to a reliance on BlackBerry smartphones by lawyers, bankers, politicians and bureaucrats.

But with budgets under pressure and competitors improving their security bone fides, BlackBerry is no longer the only game in town.

Klimavicz said NOAA's move was made possible after it switched its desktop-based software to Google Apps for Government last December. Another U.S. agency, the General Services Administration, has also moved to Google Apps, Klimavicz said.

Google's enterprise business offers Web-based versions of word processing, spreadsheet and other common software applications in a direct challenge to Microsoft. For a set price Google includes mobile-device management capabilities similar to what RIM offers for its BlackBerrys.

When Google's mobile management is coupled with Apple's tightly controlled software, NOAA can enforce password policies and it can control who can gain access to what data, which is a major concern for a range of government bodies and corporations.

Klimavicz said that in the future his agency will be able to use devices using Google's Android mobile software, but that it would have to approve each on an individual basis.

For now, the agency will buy iPhones to replace at least some of the 3,000 BlackBerrys used by its workers and is also using a small number of iPads, he said.