Ed Bott: "The biggest missing piece in the iPhone is its ability to sync calendars and e-mail effortlessly."
I also liked Bott's additional comment in the voluminous comments to his post: "That cool phone is not so cool when you miss an urgent notification of a change in a meeting because you weren't able to sync up your calendar or get an e-mail message pushed to your phone. That's how business works in 2007."
Let the drumbeats of discontent grow. You can bet calendar sync over Cingular's network was something Cingular would love to have provided, because it would have consumed so many uber-profitable data minutes. Certainly Cingular has other phones it would like to sell you if you need that essential feature. Maybe it's just a way to get more customers in the store?
(Note: Apple's "push" email through Yahoo! indicates the email situation may not be as bad as the calendaring. Thus Apple's guilty of the general crime of not treating calendaring as seriously as email, which is why so many of us still arrange our calendars via grossly inefficient email.)
I think kill is too strong a word as I doubt that the iPhone is going to be sold as a business tool. I think Apple are going to sell it as a "Lifestyle" tool and are hoping that people will buy it regardless of the limitations it has compared to other phones in it's price range.
ReplyDeleteYou are right, business use (corporate) has no chance. I'd love to use one for work but lack of on-air calendar and remote device erase makes this a no-go.
ReplyDeleteThe "only syc thru itunes" to outlook is another example of irritating platform control. This is probably self- limiting and creating opportunities for competition to exist.
I'm still not sure why push email is such a big thing... just use a specially coded SMS message to trigger the phone to poll the server. Hardly rocket science.
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