The iPhone has solved both my Treo short comings as a phone and given me the ability to somewaht limit doing e-mail on weekends and at night. I use my Treo for e-mail and my iPhone for telephone calls during the week. On weekends, or on vacation I only carry my iPhone. If I only have my iPhone and need to access e-mail I can do that through web access to our corporate exchange (same as I could access my corporate e-mail over the web from any PC). How would I know I had an urgent e-mail? Someone would call me/send me an SMS that there was an urgent e-mail needing my attention! If it was not that urgent it can wait until I am at home or at the office.

Fortunately in Germany, T-Mobile offers a new service “MultiSim”. Two SIM cards with same number, which when called, both ring similtaneously. Therefore, I can have two devices (Treo and iPhone)connected (with full mobile functionality (voice and data) on one mobile phone account. Both devices pair seemlessly with my BMW, so it does not matter which phone I have with me.

If I am driving on a business trip with other folks in my car (as I often do), I can choose to answer calls via car’s sound system with bluetooth (no privacy) or semi-private (pasengers only hear my side of the conversation) by answering on my bluetooth headset paired with my iPhone. This ability to have semi private conversations while driving with passengers is important. So, for me this is the perfect solution – Teo 650 and iPhone).

Most folks in my organization carry two mobile devices anyway, and have been doing so for years. iPhone is just great new technology, functionality and speech quality. Now I don’t need to take my iPod on business trips as well.

I believe iPhones will become very prevelant in enterprises because execs like me want one anyway. Apple will solve the technical shortcomings and IT departments will be forced to support iPhones. Goodlink or someone else will make client for iPhone similar to the client on Treo to manager corpotae Exchange e-mail integration. How long did it take for Treo/Windows Mobile/Goodlink to get push exchange e-mail sorted out so it was widely useable in Enterprises. It was several years after Blackberry came out as an e-mail device only.

I suspect it will take Apple and their SP mates to get it sorted out! The SDK get released by Apple this month, I believe, and then there will be a torrent of new apps for the iPhone that will resolve many of the Apple doubters percieved shortcomings.

P.S.: A friend of mine is an executive at one of the leading global banks. Their policy is that telephony and corpotae e-mail can not be done on same device for security reasons. He has to have two devices (Blackberry and other mobile phone)! Bet this is not the only corporate that has similar policies fort execs at senior levels.

For those arguing either side, let me offer a moment of clarity. The iPhone is a concept car. What sets Apple apart from many other consumer electronics (and computer) manufacturers is that they often put a concept car into the showroom, and into the hands of the customer. There are some customers who are willing to be on the ‘bleeding edge’ even when it’s clear that there are tremendous shortcomings — for the sake of the little leaps and bounds in functionality that set devices with the Apple logo apart from the rest of the world.

Those tradeoffs are often glossed or whitewashed over, to be sure; but the chatter is so vibrant about what gains and losses are impactful that the whole industry gains by the squabbling that we, as consumers and pundits, make between when Apple capitalizes on a concept and when the rest of the world follows suit.

Anyone who is yelling ‘all evil!’ or ‘all flawless!’ are missing the point; but if you sift through the above comments you will see quite a strong representation of the ‘fits my personal needs, and am glad for it’ — at a strong enough percentage that Apple will likely continue doing what they’ve been doing for decades.

This month, it was the new MacBook Air. To read the comment boards and forums, you’d think that Steve Jobs was personally trying to screw with all of our heads — how DARE he come out with such an overpriced, under-featured, sexy device that few will find a perfect fit for their business lives? (I am, of course, one of those opinionated, angry customers who can’t figure out why Steve didn’t make it the way *I* wanted it…)

The commenter above who pointed out that the article might just be a lame attempt to get hits on an advertisement-laden web page. But then, it’s probably somebody’s job at Apple to monitor all of this and funnel it to their R&D department before version x.x hits the store shelves. Oh, and Sony, and RIM, and Microsoft, and HP, and Toshiba, and Nokia, and… well, you get the idea.

So keep the conversations going folks; but there really isn’t a decent reason among us to be mud-slinging and aiming very personal attacks. We’re all just users in a 1.0 world — which is exactly where many of us would like to be… and stay, for one reason or another.

Open your eyes next time you travel.

The only issue I see is lack of encrypted files capability but it will soon come via the 3rd party guys.

My solution is even better. An iPod Touch and leave the phone in the briefcase.

You must work for Apple, since nobody else has access to the SDK yet, so nobody knows what it can and cannot do.

Either that or you’re just pulling these statements out of thin air. Maybe someplace a bit lower and a lot darker.

I know for a fact that the VPN will stay up without any traffic going over it at all as long as you keep the phone awake and tied to one address. I’ve got it connecting to a VPN-1 firewall at home Before updating my phone to 1.1.3, I had it jailbroken and ran all kinds of network tests with the terminal. I didn’t find any traffic that was allowed over the VPN that didn’t get sent.

Still, I feel like counterpointing to those points you raised, since they are obviously ones you agree with or feel are relevant.

The iPhone doesn’t support push business email or over-the-air calendar sync natively

This is something that nobody would have considered a problem prior to the invasion of the Crackberry. Email is disruptive. It’s a sign of a massive ego if somebody would rather feel important by being interrupted at any time of day by an inbound email alert than get their job done. Wireless synchronisation of calendar updates would be nice if it integrated into the calendar directly, but as it stands Exchange sends calendar requests as emails, so you will see them in your inbox with all the pertinent information visible.

We offer practical tips and advice for anyone who uses the web for work,

I extracted this little gem from the about page of Web Worker Daily itself in order to expose the transparent ridiculousness of the following statement:

The iPhone doesn’t handle third-party applications well.

So, third-party applications. What is the most popular format of third-party application in business today, used both by hosted service companies and developed internally by business IT teams? The Web. Oh, and guess which platform the iPhone excels at, far more so than any other handheld communication device?

When the battery kicks the bucket, so does the device.

Unless of course you send it to Apple to have it replaced. Which you shouldn’t have to do for quite a long time. Yes, this replacement carries a cost but then so does replacing a removable battery in any other device. Really this story isn’t about the lifespan of the device being tied to the battery, but the fact it isn’t user-serviceable. This may or may not be an issue (many devices used in a corporate environment are not user-serviceable; why should this particular one need to be if you’re only going to replace it after two years?).

The iPhone can’t secure data on the device through encryption.

IT can’t lock or wipe a lost or stolen device remotely.

Both of these fall into the ‘If it applies to your business, …’ caveat I mentioned above. There will certainly be businesses for whom the loss of sensitive data could be highly damaging, but there are far many more for whom it is more likely to be an inconvenience (what sensitive data can you store on an iPhone? Email and calendar appointments? That’s really about all). Certainly once factored against the benefits of the iPhone, these issues may not be sufficiently important for them to be concerned.

Anyway; the biggest thing that annoys me about seeing this sort of spurious, FUD-filled report being reproduced is when the article author doesn’t question the assertions being made. Saying “X organisation says this, what do you reckon?” is not behaving like a professional journalist. It’s being a hack.

Any time there might be sensitive data on the device, there are federal and state regulations requiring “reasonable and appropriate” measures be taken to protect consumer financial and personal information. If somebody emails you a tax form with a client’s social security number on the form, that attachment will be stored on the iPhone before it can be viewed (IMAP stores the attachment on the server, but because the attachment might be encoded, in a zip archive, etc. all mail programs save the final attachment to disk). That could be a violation of federal and state laws.

It’s trivial to steal hard drives/flash memory from a device and hook it up to another device, bypassing all the password protection on the device itself. Only if the underlying hard drive or flash memory are completely encrypted is the data safe. Many IT departments require mobile devices be completely locked down so that if the device gets stolen, no proprietary or sensitive information can get in the hands of the wrong person.