Why I Don’t Think iPhone is Ready for Business

As you all know, we on the Microsoft Across America team are truly mobile employees who need to have access and be productive from anywhere. I have heard folks say how cute the iPhone is and I also had a business friend state that he purchased one and had to give it to his wife because it was not giving him what he needed. I got to play with it for a little and here are the main reasons why I could not use an iPhone as a productivity tool:

Search capability – I get several e-mail messages. On the iPhone there is no way to search and find an email from a few days ago. I must continuously scroll until I locate the desired message. That is not good if I have more than 10 messages in my inbox; which most of us do. On my Windows Mobile, I can just start typing the letters of what I am looking for and it is found immediately for me. I can even search my Exchange server for mail from last month, 90 days, or any of my mail on the server. I can't spend minutes looking for e-mail. That is lost time.

Attachments – Attachments are at the very end of the e-mail message. If there is a long thread, I have to scroll down to the very end of the e-mail thread to get the attachment. Ok, the scrolling feature is cute but not when I need to get to something quickly. On my Windows Mobile, my attachments are at the beginning of my e-mail just under the subject.

Photos-I cannot associate photos with my contacts. I have several contacts and for a lot of my business contacts I associate their photo with their contact information. This is a great feature on Windows Mobile. I also collect a lot of business cards at my events. To avoid having to sort and manage hard copies of business cards I take a photo of the card and store them all in One Note Mobile, which syncs to my laptop. I am now able to search all of the business cards in One Note.

Web Browsing – You must scroll to read the entire line of text. Ok, this is fine for the first line but if you are reading an article online you are constantly scrolling back and forth to read that article. The text on my Windows Mobile device is automatically formatted for me to fit my screen.

Applications – iPhone has over 500 applications available for the iPhone. Windows Mobile has over 2,000 applications available for Windows Mobile. Business applications for realty, medical, sporting. Our Partners are ensuring that the business person can go mobile and have access to business applications.

Enterprise ready, not quite for the business person who wants to be productive while away from the office or a laptop. The things that I take for granted on my phone just amazes me when looking at the others.

Find out more about Windows Mobile here.