Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
While Apple has clearly gone after consumers to start with, business requirements for synchronisation and email are usually much more stringent, meaning we might all finally get things like the ability to synchronise notes and the ability to do an iPhone-wide internal search to be able to find a contact or a note quickly, which surprisingly still isn’t possible after several firmware updates.
Given Mac OS X’s ‘spotlight’ feature that has been widely promoted, it beggars belief that Apple thought iPhone users could live without a search capability, especially when handheld computers like the Palm, Nokia and Windows Mobile smartphones, among others, have had search for some time now.
Business users will also want Exchange synchronisation, or perhaps Blackberry client compatibility. No-one knows whether we’ll really get what we want – perhaps Apple’s idea of ‘enterprise’ features is something we’ll all be scratching our heads at, as we have with simple things like search not being a standard feature.
I remember reading one commenter on the new 1.1.4 firmware at another site saying that the iPhone’s Wi-Fi capabilities had been improved.
Unfortunately I don’t know if all 1.1.4 users have had the same experience, as I have read pre-1.1.4 that some had complained their university or workplaces had Wi-Fi set up in a configuration the iPhone couldn’t support – so better Wi-Fi support would certainly be welcome in security heavy enterprise environments.
No doubt there are all kinds of other enterprise features I haven’t thought of, but in a few days we will all find out what is on Apple’s mind.
The other big question is whether or not the SDK will actually arrive on March 6th, or whether it will be in an alpha or beta stage, with the full SDK perhaps due to arrive at Apple’s WWDC (WorldWide Developer Conference) later this year.
There will be some disappointment if the SDK is further delayed, so we’ll just have to wait and see whether Apple delivers – or delivers us a longer wait.
The iPhone’s interface is still streets ahead of all competitors, despite a range of touch screen phones arriving from LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Nokia and others. So an extra delay will hardly cause any real damage to the iPhone.
Still... if Apple wants to sell 10 million iPhones this year alone (yes Steve Jobs DID say 10 million in 2008 alone, not including 2007 – go and check for yourself in his 2007 keynote before telling me otherwise)... an SDK and enterprise features will clearly help a lot.
What would also help Apple is finally bringing iPhone to many more countries than the current four, while a true 3G or 3.5G model, hopefully with 32GB storage at least, would be very helpful to sales, too.
So... Apple has finally said something about the SDK, and yes, BusinessWeek was right again. Can’t wait to see what surprises and disappointments Steve Jobs has in store for us all on March 6!
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
LATEST HEADLINES FROM YOUR IT
