AT&T, the company formerly known as Cingular, will in fact market the iPhone to business users, making Microsoft’s recent claims all the more relevant. If this seems dumb to you — because of the lack of third-party apps, non-replaceable battery and new, untested operating system — then it certainly seems dumb to many of those analysts we always read about. One of which said, “we’d immediately tell our customers that’d be a very serious mistake.” Maybe AT&T should rethink this.
It’s not that the iPhone won’t be a good cellphone, because, in all honesty and minus the hype, it’ll probably be at least halfway decent, but that it just doesn’t seem to have been developed with business users in mind. Leave that to the WinMo6s and Symbians of the world, whose open architecture means business can write write custom mobile apps that integrate with their enterprise systems. You don’t see me trying to render Toy Story on my iMac, you won’t see Joe Wall St fiddling with the iPhone’s touchscreen when he could be rolling a BlackBerry’s thumb wheel for all its worth.
AT&T to target iPhone to enterprise [Macworld via Mac Rumors]