Is the iPhone fit for business? Part one

Although the iPhone is aimed squarely at consumers, we all know many corporate devices come to favour through the back door, so why should the latest member of Apple's family be any different?

By Maggie Holland, 31 Dec 2007 at 02:53

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I have to admit that my last experience of a 'touch sensitive' phone was LG's Chocolate in 2006. While I'm a confirmed chocoholic and then some, my time with the device left somewhat of a bitter taste in my mouth. As such, my sceptic's hat was firmly on when iPhone mutterings were first heard some time ago.

Nonetheless, I cast my scepticism aside when Apple offered me the chance of an indepth review session with its beloved newborn as I was keen to see exactly what the innovation had to offer.

Day one

I have to admit that my day one of testing wasn't an immediate act. The iPhone sat unloved in its (minimalist) box for the best part of a week, waiting for some attention from its new foster parent. Rather than leaving it at home for fear of burglars or at the office for fear of jealous colleagues, I lugged the device around in my bag. Everywhere I went, it went too. Every stranger that spoke to me, every tube journey I travelled, and every step I took was an act fraught with concern that I may become muggers' bounty. But I survived unscathed.

Once I'd gotten over my initial over paranoid outlook and lacklustre approach to reviewing the device I found the set up process pretty easy, although synching contact numbers was a bit of a pain to say the least.

Given that the iPhone is not aimed at business users (who are likely to have all their contacts stored in Outlook or the like) the process you have to go through is a tad arduous. Most of my personal contact numbers are not stored in the conventional business way and I no longer have all the cables and sofware that came with my phone. I have previously worked around this by using Bluetooth file transfer or saving numbers to SIM, inserting the old SIM in my new phone and then saving numbers to said new phone. Neither of these options are viable with the iPhone so I had to sit there manually entering my address book, contact by contact. That seems more than a little archaic for a state of the art device.

Having said that, to see how easy it would be in an ideal world, I was able to synch up my husband's N95 device with Outlook to transfer his contacts and then export this data from Outlook onto the iPhone. The whole process took a matter of minutes from start to finish. So I guess the speed at which you can transfer your contacts over rests quite heavily on your previous phone.

Elsewhere, simplicity is evident in Apple's latest brainchild, demonstrated through the Mac OS X-based user interface (UI) and sleek hardware aesthetics.

After unlocking the phone using the 'slide to unlock' bar, users are greeted by a black home page with four key icons (Phone, Mail, Safari and iPod) beaming up at you from their residence along the horizontal bottom main menu. Above the main menu, users will find 13 other icons: (from left to right) SMS, Calendar, Photos, Camera, YouTube, Stocks, Maps, Weather, Clock, Calculator, Notes, Settings and, finally, iTunes.

The selection of icons is perhaps a little needless as many of them aren't necessary at top level navigation or seem to duplicate effort. Most of us, for example, are used to locating our calculator functionality through the settings menu, while some expect to locate photos via the camera button or vice versa.

The choice to place 13 icons and leave some blank black space at the left-hand bottom also seems odd at first glance but is most likely room for manoeuvre when Apple updates firmware in the future.

There is also talk of Apple opening up the iPhone to third-party developers from February 2008 (when the SDK is released), which could elevate the device's appeal among business users to another level.