The Mobile Media Review: The 'iPhone Revisited' Edition.

With last week's release of the Apple iPhone SDK, announcements surrounding enterprise deployments and the prospect of a new mobile content model launching on the iPhone store in June, this seems a good time to revisit the loudest handset launch in history.

In this edition of "Mobile Media Review," we examine the iPhone's prospects in the enterprise and do a spot check on the current state of Web app development for the iPhone. With 100,000 downloads of the SDK in the first few days of release, it's obvious that developers everywhere see this as a target platform now. In mobile releases from Facebook, LinkedIn and Google (all reviewed previously in "Mobile Media Review"), we're seeing a pattern evolve. Mobile developers are using the iPhone as their marquee platforms and then dumbing down their target designs to feature phones and smartphones. This isn't a bad development for the industry. We think LinkedIn on WAP is all the better for it. The iPhone is helping the field re-imagine what an interface can be, even if you don't have all the hardware tools necessary in every handset.

Dialing Up The Enterprise

Apple's announcement of support for enterprise needs is neither half- hearted nor incomplete. As most analysts already have pointed out, the technology and interface behind the next iteration of the iPhone OS will pose formidable competition to existing BlackBerry systems and Windows Mobile smartphones.

Adding compatibility with Microsoft Exchange by licensing ActiveSynch was a masterful move. Rather than cobble together a workaround, the Apple corps made the wise decision of reaching out to other standards rather than locking them out and imposing its own superior sensibility (which is, after all, the Apple way). By talking to Exchange in its native language, the iPhone is promising to receive push e-mail, contacts and calendaring so employees on the road essentially stay in sync with the home office. More to the point, Apple is adding support for network infrastructures, including a range of VPNs for better authentication. Finally, Apple is offering IT tool sets that allow staff to manage and deploy iPhones throughout an organization. Now IT can turn features on and off, and apply common configurations and security measures across a fleet of phones. Or so they are promising.

But wait, there's more. In addition to the Apple Iphone Store, where consumers will find and buy third-party apps, Apple also is building a custom app store infrastructure the enterprise can use to push custom apps to its employees. An iPhone Enterprise Beta Program lets IT managers play with the new tools in advance of the 2.0 release in June.

What is exceptional about the Apple enterprise announcement is that it is a fully baked response to common reservations from corporate IT about adopting the one phone its employees most want. What Apple has done wisely and effectively is remove the reasons not to adopt its phone. The only one left is for IT and management to decide how many systems and phone lines they want to manage. Still, it does seem unlikely that an entire enterprise will adopt a single phone unit. The iPhone does lack the model flexibility that BlackBerry and Windows Mobile have.