News Articles
Business Week | July 3, 2007
Making the iPhone Better for Business
by Stephen H. Wildstrom
Excerpt from http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2007/tc2007072_848765.htm?chan=search
"Apple promised that the Safari browser would bring the "real Internet" to the iPhone instead of the crippled version of Web pages that you can get on most handhelds. It also said that the ability to write browser-based applications was an adequate alternative to the sort of third-party native applications that are available on all other smartphones.
It turns out that both claims are drastically overstated. The iPhone version of Safari is missing two major building blocks of Web-based applications, Sun Microsystems' (SUNW) Java, which is used to run programs in a browser window, and Adobe Systems' (ADBE) Flash, which is used to generate video and multimedia images. Both are extensively used on both consumer and internal corporate Web sites.
Perhaps more seriously, iPhone only half-supports the technologies used to allow users to create content on Web sites, again an approach widely used on both consumer and business sites. The biggest problem is that most of the time, clicking on an area of a page designed from free-form data entry fails to bring up the iPhone's on-screen keyboard, leaving you no way to enter anything. As a result, such Web-based applications as Google and Zoho's productivity applications and Six Apart's TypePad blogging tool don't work on the iPhone.
The problem is solvable, since Transmedia has figured out a way to make its Glide Mobile suite of applications work on the iPhone. But Apple should come up with a general solution rather than forcing each Web service to find a work-around on its own. Apple should also work with Adobe and Sun to add Flash and Java support to the iPhone and to improve Safari's handling of Javascript.
At the moment, corporate IT departments really don't have much to fear from iPhones because they just aren't equipped to work with enterprise systems. But mobile executives buy the overwhelming majority of smartphones, and Apple is going to need these customers. It should move quickly to develop the software partnerships required to meet their needs and win their business."