[Macworld]

Post your comments for Making the iPhone a killer business device here

[dreyfus]

OMG, that was the x-millionth article trying to help Apple to get on the horse... they have outsold everybody else in the meantime.
I am an corporate user and an IT manager and I do not need most of the things listed (ok, copy and paste, accessible file system - even if only a shared space for application data, unified inbox and support for Apple's own calendar server would be the obvious exceptions, but those are not exclusive needs of business users). Kerio and Zimbra are well supported on the iPhone, Exchange is the clear market leader and ActiveSync can and has be licensed. It is not Apple's fault that (dead guys use) Groupwise and IBM/Lotus do not get their act together... as long as Lotus will rely on Java on the client side... it won't happen; they have made dozens of announcements about OS X and iPhone support, there is nothing yet (which really is a shame, as the far better document support in Notes would make them a much clearer choice for our company - as long as they cannot put one decent client application together, they have to do without our money). I also do not see, why Apple should develop MS Office editing capabilities... there is a MS Business Unit that could offer an application if they wanted to and any third party developer can do it... maybe that demand is imaginary or it is not important enough for anybody to pay for it (I had phones with this capability for years and I have not used it even once). For us (as we deal a lot with European and Asian government agencies) read support for OpenOffice (ODT) would be much much more urgent, unfortunately Apple is ignoring these open formats completely.
iPhone configuration and deployment actually works pretty well and if I have to use iTunes or ActiveSync to upload applications, does not really bother me at all. What does bother me is that even iPhone applications targeting business users do not allow for central configuration. E.g. expense reporting or time tracking applications should be able to pull their value lists from a company server (e.g. developer specifies a XML format, URL goes into app settings and then the phone will keep things up-to-date)

[dreyfus]

KPO said:

Is there a real Office-compatible application like QuickOffice yet? That would be a significant development and would make the iPhone a useful notebook replacement on short trips.

Not yet. The have released MobileFiles which can display Office docs and also download them from MobileMe, a premium version / real QuickOffice seems to be still in the works.

I see three real problems with any such application at the moment:

- No system-wide cut/copy/paste and no standard how to implement same. An office app without that is most useless and spending a lot of money creating an own solution will only get you bad ratings, once Apple comes out with their solution and it might be different.
- Same goes for text selection.
- No shared storage - apps cannot "see each other" or share files. If I cannot get an email attachment into the office app, and I cannot attach the edited office document to an email, that reduces its usefulness to almost zero. So far the SDK only allows images as attachments and no attachments can be stored in an accessible file system - several apps use a dediated Web server to handle attachment generation, others embed raw code into the email... both are bad solutions.

[ElectroTech]

Apple so needs all your help to become a success with the iPhone. Why don't you just show them your phone technology and your business plan for your great smart phone that you produced and let them copy it. Wasn't it you who convinced them to produce the 3G iPhone 2 weeks before they came out with it? That was all the lead time they needed to bring your ideas to fruition.
Oh yah, you don't have any technology, business plan or smart phone of your own. And right, you don't have a clue either.

[FaroZ06]

Also iPhone needs internet sharing.
This feature is on Macs, but a little different.
It shares it internet connection with other wi-fi devices (computer, iPhone, etc.). It may share wi-fi to Firewire, Ethernet to Airport, or Firewire to Bluetooth, or any combanation of those.
Anyway, the iPhone needs an option to share its 3G internet connection over Bluetooth to another Mac (with a password, of course)

[bonesb]

You missed one big omission - not including OBEX BT code in the iPhone's BT stack - to exchange vCard data. I thought ATTWS and VZW should be flogged for disabling OBEX - I can't even e-mail or receive contact data from my iPhone unless I buy some third-party hacks from the App Store, and none of them do the job right. Not including OBEX on the iPhone is, in my mind, inexcusable. I now include every single contact with me in vCard format on my VZW Treo in a space I can access in the Treo's accessible memory.
The iPhone 2.0 platform has been out for 5 months. The author lists 10 items needed to make the iPhone a killer business device, a couple of posters have added a few other items to that list.
The iPhone still has a protected file system, no-brainer items locked out to the consumer space, and indicated to thousands of customers that certain features - copy/select/cut/paste, MMS, access to a unified storage space, a few other items available on other mobile platforms - aren't in the cards for the iPhone. The App Store hosts more crap than Handango ever did - and some pretty innovative applications.
Apple's made it clear to me that it's a consumer-based platform hosting a lot of crapware and some really elegant solutions and music and ringtones. The world has the BB, WinMo, and Palm for business - I'm keeping my iPhone for fun stuff, but for work I'm stuck with my Treo 755p with Documents-To-Go and a camcorder for data work during breaks, BT/IR/email/MMS/expandable storage to get data into and out of my place and into the hands of my vendors, OBEX BT to exchange vCards, and copy/select/cut/paste to edit long email threads when I reply to messages. Yes, I use IR to get data into and out of Trimble survey handhelds in the field.

[tspore]

copy and paste, copy and paste, copy and paste. I hear that just about daily, and agree that it is needed. But the 1 feature that I really miss from my "Crackberry" is the ability to set times to accept email. I usually leave the phone on at night, for emergency phone calls, and on my blackberry I could set it up so that from 11PM to 6AM it wouldn't check email. That would be really nice here. So I wouldn't have to manually go in and change that each evening and morning.
The iPhone has come a long way since version 1.0 but still in my opinion that timer feature is a must have.

[montgomery_burns]

Apple will not make a video iPod. Nobody wants to watch video on an iPod.
Apple will not make a cell phone.
There will be no iPhone SDK. Nobody wants third party applications on the iPhone.
Apple will never switch to Intel processors.