The iPhone is not a business phone. Too often that notion is ignored by pundits and members of the press, eager to claim the iPhone will give enterprise  smartphones -- which give access to business-class software, not merely music and movies -- a run for their money. But will it?
With its sleek, snazzy design, it's wide, bright screen, its ready access to 4 or 8 GB of music and movies, and its price tag of $499 or $599 (depending on the hard drive's size), the iPhone seeks to bring high-end smartphone features -- long the preserve of business road rogues and executives -- to the mainstream masses.
Indeed, even if the iPhone did offer such business necessities as push e-mail and access to enterprise systems, its high price is more than sufficient to keep I.T. departments at bay. Compare it with Samsung's BlackJack ($199), Palm's Treo 680 ($199), Nokia's E62 ($99), or BlackBerry's 7290 ($99). They're all smartphones, and they're all sold by Cingular, the only network that will be selling the iPhone upon its release in June.
But just because the iPhone is meant for consumers does not mean it won't impact business users and their wide array of gadgets. In fact, it might impact them profoundly.
The Ripple Effect
The iPhone's main claim to fame is the power of its interface. During his Macworld keynote speech, Apple CEO Steve Jobs emphasized that smartphones might benefit from better design.
Take Web browsing, for instance. The iPhone displays Web sites in all their glory, without parsing them to fit on the tiny screen of the average smartphone. Both Microsoft's Pocket Internet Explorer and Opera's Mobile can reformat, rearrange, and shrink a Web site, and both do it well. But it's one thing to see the front page of the New York Times as it appears on a normal monitor, another to see it reduced to a long, scrolling column of text and tiny photos.
"It's a given that when Apple releases a new interface to the market that the rest of the market watches very carefully, and eventually begins to integrate some of that functionality into future designs," said Carmi Levy, senior analyst at the Info-Tech Research Group.
Thus Palm, Microsoft, and RIM might be forced to meet Steve Jobs on his own turf, improving the look and feel of their products while maintaining the business-class features that enterprise users demand.
Not the First Time
This wouldn't be the first time Apple makes the competition move.
"Microsoft was clearly influenced by Apple 24 years ago when they first released the Lisa," said Levy. The Lisa is credited as being one of the first PCs with a GUI, or graphical user interface, designed for the consumer world. "A lot of the functionality of the Lisa and the Mac made their way into Microsoft products," he added.
Even LG's Prada -- a high-end consumer smartphone whose sleek design might be its best selling point (beyond, of course, the Prada name) -- might force other handset makers to rethink the way their devices present data.
"It shows the rest of the industry what's possible," said Levy. "It raises the state of the art in interface design and usability for mobile smartphones and high-end converged devices."
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