There's no business like iPhone business - at all

David M Williams
Thursday, 10 July 2008 14:24

Your IT - Mobility

No. I can’t buy an iPhone outright like that and put my SIM card in it. Optus told me this would not work – the iPhone must go on to a special “Apple plan.”

My Telstra rep confirmed this also. In fact, he said Telstra are also selling the iPhone outright ($726 for the 8GB model and $847 for the 16GB model) and – unlike Optus – they are not network locking them at all. However, again, the phone will not work unless the SIM inside it is on a special “Apple plan.”

So that’s that; the situation looked bleak. What I was continually being told was I cannot buy an iPhone and connect it to a corporate pricing plan. The only option being given is to sign up for a whole new contract, totally independent of any other mobiles or contracts in the fleet.

My spirits brightened when I learned that Vodafone were offering business plans – but alas, these were simply new, independent, plans in their own right also. The voice and data rates and inclusions may vary – as well as the monthly fee – from the lower end consumer plans but fundamentally single user, non-corporate, non-government plans they were.

I spoke with Telstra’s Media Relations Spokesperson, Peter Taylor, this afternoon. I felt sorry for the poor guy as he was being inundated with phone calls. Yet, despite this he told me I am the only person who has asked him about enterprise users at all. (He also told me that Telstra wouldn't have any pre-paid iPhones, and he said this was new news, but I am sure it figures for the same reasons.)

To Peter’s view, corporations and governments wouldn’t go out and buy new handsets like this. He didn’t see them as lining up at stores at midnight. He figured this segment would consider it, crunch some numbers and possibly make a purchasing decision at a much later time.

Yet, this argument still presupposes that the pricing plans will be independent of an existing corporate plan. After all, whether we buy (say) a Motorola v9 or a Nokia E51 or a BlackBerry 8800 or an Apple iPhone the only difference should be the cost of the hardware itself plus any known inclusions like the regular flat monthly fee that a BlackBerry attracts for its e-mail service. I think it reasonable to expect that the iPhone would and could be used on our corporate plan just like the other handsets can. I can swap my SIM between any of them and pay the same fee for voice calls. I can order a different SIM (and number) for each of them and pay the same for voice calls. I can swap the SIMs and handsets around with every phone across all of Telstra’s offerings – except for the Apple iPhone. It alone is the exception. It alone is the phone which is not being sold to enterprises.

But yet, what’s with all the guff about push mail? What’s with all the talk of Microsoft Exchange integration? How many home users do Apple think run their own Exchange server at home?

CONTINUED