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Monday, June 11, 2007
So much is being said about the iPhone and how great it will be but interesting enough, those that can truly afford this luxury, Corporate America, is the one being ignored in all the hype. As previously stated on SvenOnTech, the iPhones lack of support for BlackBerry and Exchange Direct-Push is going to be one dubious problem for Steve Jobs to hit that announced 1% of market share by next year (2008.) At a staggering $500 a pop, most tweens are going to be left wishing they had an iPhone instead of owning one. What Steve Jobs forgot to mention at his Keynote back in January was the majority of smartphone buyers are not tweens but rather “suits”. And what are the suits looking for? E-mail. Not Yahoo e-mail, corporate e-mail. You know, stuff that plugs into HQs Exchange server or BlackBerry service without a hitch.
Without support for these two mainstream e-mail services, you can pretty much figure the iPhone is going to have issue maintaining a rise in the market share. Sure, the iPhone is going to sell out on the 29th, but that’s what happens to a limited supplied product on its premiere day after months of hype before it. But when these phones get in the hands of those users and many find no way to connect to their Exchange server, whelp, refreshed stock will be met with returned day-one sold iPhones. Heck, that’s my plan if the iPhone doesn’t support my Exchange server and I know many other professionals will be doing the same thing.
One feature the iPhone is certain not to have is the ability to remotely synchronize like Windows Mobile phones do. Boy, has this been a life saver for me more than once. Out in the middle of no-where, my phone required a hard-reset and gone is all my data. Thankfully I was able to configure my Exchange Server information and in 20 minutes, I had all my contacts, calendar, and e-mail back to where it was previously. Actually, new e-mail had arrived. The iPhone won’t have this luxury and trust me, you’ll have to do a hard-reset on the iPhone, too. As good as Apple is, nothing is perfect.
Topping it off, Apple CEO Steve Jobs stated today at WWDC that they “hope” to have an SDK (developers kit) out for the iPhone (someday?) which basically means that a third-party won’t be able to even make an application to do the Exchange or Blackberry connect if it wanted to. This leaves little hope for Exchange and BlackBerry support. One can only pray that Jobs just felt like not acknowledging the support for personal reasons (hates Microsoft) and professional ones (Yahoo was on stage, not RIM). Honestly, I’m still baffled why Yahoo Mail is even supported at all! But I digress.
In short, I’m not the only one that feels this way. Forbes released a very in depth article stating all the issues with the iPhone (battery, scratches, keyboard, etc.) It’s nice to see not everyone is blinded by the hype.
June 12th, 2007 at 3:31
man i cant WAIT for the iphone, i read every article i can find on it. this could be a big problem btu i dont think it will hurt me 2 much. im still pissed about EDGE insted of 3G though
June 12th, 2007 at 7:10
There’s nothing preventing apple from writing a Blackberry/RIM client for the iPhone for enterprise users. RIM allows that on other phones (I believe a number of Nokia phones can have a Blackberry client). Apple doesn’t need this now to sell a lot of phones, so I don’t think we’ll see it right away. But there’s no technical limitation here – it’s more a matter of Apple and RIM getting together and if the iPhone is popular, I think RIM will be willing to ride that wave. It’s another way for them to prevail in their fight with MS over enterprise push email (MS would like to displace RIM).
June 12th, 2007 at 8:48
“too expensive, no SDK, the iPhone will suck”
I think something similar was said about a certain MP3 player…
June 12th, 2007 at 9:28
I don’t think the phone will suck, John. For what it does do, outside of the EDGE backward step, this phone is incredible. I am simply pointing out that corporate users are the ones that usually float these phones. The high cost will curb many from purchasing it. Remember, the first iPod buyers were not tweens but those in the 25-34 age demographics.
To apply your quote to another device from Apple, think Newton. It could go both ways.
June 12th, 2007 at 11:56
Actually, if it were not for the newton we wouldn’t have Palm. So that’s either good or bad depending how you look at it. The main point is we really don’t know what’s going to happen when the iPhone is going to be released for sale. I’m sure that Apple is not without a plan for the enterprise market. Their not THAT dumb.
Ever wonder what is in that cross licensing plan with Cisco?
June 12th, 2007 at 13:01
The first 10 million will quickly be sold to iPod users. A lot of those buyers will also be Mac users.
That 10 million installed base of iPhone users will be the incentive to then bring on any software that corporate users need, showing up as web based apps.
No problem here, move on.
June 12th, 2007 at 16:54
Exchange is also missing from OS X, but that hasn’t stopped apple making a really profitable business in the higher-end laptop market. Just about everyone with a macbook pro is going to want an iPhone, period. Most of these users are not in the corporate environment. The iphone will sync and integrate perfectly with their data on their laptops. Your characterisation of the market (tweens or enterprise) leaves out the existing Apple computer market, which is growing rapidly.
June 12th, 2007 at 17:01
Boris, you’re making some assumptions. I know of many people with MacBook Pros running Entourage, as I do, connected to Exchange servers.
Another issue with your analogy is that even if every Mac user bought an iPhone, Apple would still be short 4.5 million of it’s projected 10 million sales for 2008.
Enterprise users are the major buyer of smartphones. Discount them and it will effect your sales.
June 16th, 2007 at 18:24
I think a big problem will be the screen, specifically scratches. There’s all kinds of potential ways to scratch a surface like that, and it’s hard to predict how resistant the iphone will be. There’s even a site already dedicated to iphone scratches.
Still though, wow, multitouch will rock the house.
June 18th, 2007 at 18:50
Sven, the biggest hole in your argument starts when you state that your Windows mobile did a hard reset and you lost all your data and then state that the same thing will happen to an iPhone.
As an owner of 2 different Windows mobiles myself, I can categorically state that there is no way that Apple will be as unbelievably stupid as Microsoft to design their phone such that all of the data, programs and settings on their phone will be erased just by LETTING THE BLASTED BATTERY GO FLAT!! This has now happened several times to me and most recently my HTC-designed O2 XDA IIs just spontaneously did a hard reset with a full battery charge and I lost everything – again.
Here are some of my other complaints about Windows mobile (that I’ve posted elsewhere) that you neglect to consider:
I have got to the stage of loathing my XDA IIs as from the user interface perspective, it is the worst phone/PDA I have ever used. The OS crashes and freezes daily, texting, the address book, connecting to wifi, launching apps, the blasted start menu etc are all some of the worst-designed pieces of software I’ve ever seen.
Physically my XDA IIs has so many plastic buttons and a slide-out keyboard half of which don’t work anymore that I have now gone back to using my old Sony Ericsson P900 PDA phone which despite it’s own problems is so much better as a phone and PDA it’s like night and day. The Windows mobile PDAs used by upper management at our campus cause an out-of-proportion number of support problems with synching faults, connectivity issues etc.
Windows Mobile is a terrible phone OS with tiny on-screen buttons for choosing contacts to phone, horrible SMS texting and is as flaky as Windows 95 with regular freezes and required resets and the number of convoluted steps required to connect to our campus wireless LAN is unbelievable and sometimes it works but more often it doesn’t. Most Windows Mobile PDA users on campus have given up trying to connect to the campus wifi (including our the campus Telecom manager!) I’m growing to hate it more and more every day. It’s like death from a thousand cuts.
The iPhone’s OS X is a far more robust, capable OS than Windows Mobile and being a direct subset of the desktop Mac OS X promises to be far more powerful and flexible than the shoddy Windows CE (Windows Mobile) which bears no relation to Windows XP other than superficial looks and that horrible Start menu (on a tiny screen – why for the love of Pete!). Heck Windows Mobile is crammed into only a dozen or so megabytes on the XDA IIs while OS X on the iPhone is a fully featured 500MBs in size.
After my phonechose to do a hard reset a few days ago for no discernible reason (the battery didn’t go flat), I lost all my data off the internal 128MB storage, but I still haven’t got around to finding and re-installing all of my programs, and I’ve lost all my preferences and settings so will have to set it up again for all the wifi networks I connect to (or should I say TRY to connect to). Compare that to iTunes handling the complete synching, prefs and app install process. I think you’ll find that with Leopard’s “Back to my Mac” .Mac integration, it’ll do the remote re-synching that saved your bacon on your Windows mobile.
To add insult to injury, every time Windows Mobile hard resets, it forces you to go thru a tutorial on clicking and dragging which you can’t escape from as if you had never used the PDA before. Who the #@#$%&* designed this operating system should be taken out and buried head first in a pile of wet kippers. It is unbelievable.
Microsoft not only has no taste, they have no idea what well written software is like or how to make computer/electronic equipment friendly. Apple may not be perfect but they are a quantum leap ahead of Microsoft in these areas.
Also Sven, you neglect the fact that the iPhone will still out of the box connect to Exchange with IMAP so all is not lost for the corporate crowd. I too would like the Push-email option, but I’ll be more than happy using IMAP like I do on my laptop in the meantime.
For these and many more reasons, I think the iPhone will be the roaring success many are expecting.
-Mart
June 18th, 2007 at 21:52
Martin, as great as Apple is in its coding, it too has problems. My friends iPod 4G needed a hard-reset the other day because it still showed the “Connected” screen for his car stereo even though we were hundreds of feet away from it inside the pizza parlor we were enjoying dinner at. The iPhone will not be void of hard-resets. I’ve owned enough iPods to know this.
Now, this is not to discount your points about Windows Mobile. Everything you say has happened on my XV6700 (HTC made) device. I reset (soft) the stupid thing at least three times a day. I LOL’d on the tutorial bit after the hard-reset. I HATE that, too!
Microsoft has a pathetic OS. Agreed. But that wasn’t the point of this piece. The high need, almost addictive state, for push e-mail from Exchange and Blackberry users is what’s going to be a very bad thing for the iPhones continued corporate success. I know about the IMAP support in the iPhone; however, Apple’s own Mail.app support for Exchange and IMAP from an Exchange server is not impressive at all. This from a mature application. How much better can we expect from the iPhone?
I think you’re right, Martin, that the iPhone is a much better device than anything running Microsoft’s operating system. I’ve been using it since Windows CE 1.0 and outside from ditching the Start menu and moving from black and white to color, Microsoft hasn’t made much improvement over the near decade of its existence. Apple, on the other hand, I’m sure has done a much better job, but, Apple isn’t the Almighty and thus you can expect some issues.
Truth is, if the IMAP works good enough for me to check my mail and the battery life gets me through a *long* day and I don’t have to reset the phone daily or even weekly, then I will be a very happy camper. I’ll even over look the lack of voice command though I’ll be a bit ticked if custom ringtones is missing.
June 19th, 2007 at 5:23
Sven, you mentioned your friend’s iPod needing a hard reset. After restarting, it didn’t wipe all the songs on the wee beastie though did it? As I stated, I don’t believe Apple is perfect, but I maintain my case that Apple can’t possibly create as bad a balls-up as Windows Mobile and as such I don’t think the lack of Exchange push-email will be the total deal-breaker that you propose.
You see, I reckon many corporate users will be more than willing to put up with IMAP or POP email to their corporate server for the time being if it means they get a phone that is:
- sensible, user-friendly and smart (have you seen how it answers calls and so intuitively allows the transition to conference calling etc),
- a web browser that doesn’t have you cursing every time you have to scroll sideways and back zigg-zagging down a page just to read a web page,
- with beautiful big gorgeous buttons for fat fingers that they don’t have to squint at to see with their aging baby-boomer eyes,
- that doesn’t crap out in the middle of a call with a system freeze,
- that doesn’t require configuring 3 different screens with arcane terminology like PEAP-MSCHAPv2 and
- which syncs everything with their computer as easily as their iPod.
You see, that is something the Vice Chancellor and upper management at our university (who all currently have these frustrating MS devices) would immediately see the benefits of.
I actually do agree that the iPhone needs Exchange push email support as well as an open development platform for future fantastic killer apps that will have the added benefit of significantly increasing the profile of OS X Cocoa development. I whole-heartedly hope Steve releases that iPhone SDK sometime a little further down the track, but again, I think you underestimate just how poorly the MS alternative compares to this revelation in usability.
I for one despite having paid hundreds of dollars to purchase Destinator GPS software, PocketBible, Spb add-ons to try and cover over the glaring deficiencies in the UI and other software have got to the stage where I will gladly give it all up for something that just b****y works, stops me from having to carry around an iPod as well, has a glorious, elegant interface that allows me to get my work done and a decent amount of flash storage for all my media and data files.
Come on, do you really think ol’ Stevo has put almost half a gigabyte of Mac OS X into this device if he was planning to limit its functionality to basic closed iPod-like functionality? Exchange push email can’t be that far off – I’m willing to make that bet.
-Mart