Apple iPhone handsetAre you a company in the field of media, and thinking of which phones to buy to your employees? Despite the sexiness and likeliness of the phone, which is awsome, you should also consider the following reasons:

  • If your company will be developing any sort of applications for your iPhone, you won’t be able to test them unless they are launched in the Apple AppStore publically to everyone*
  • You can’t really develop any internal private application for the Apple iPhone - which means anything you offer must be open to the public
  • Any application you offer has to be using a public API - not a private API that you created and want to keep as internal knowledge - forget it
  • If your company uses any sort of FILE SHARING and file transfer, you’ll probably have to develop an APP, because you won’t send it over Bluetooth :-)
  • If you want quality pictures to be taken from it in the work area, well, the quality of phone camera is not so detailed
  • If you want to plug it in any big corporate system - it will be a pain reading all those manuals
  • Of course another big problem for corporations is, you can’t really get another iPhone if your first one broke, they’ll have to send it to China for repairs, or you can use local repair shops (and again, lose warranty)
*unless you want to jailbreak the device, lose your warranty and dignity that you bought it and have to hack it to test on it in the first place, and also - you can’t do that to everyones handset obviously.
Now technically, let’s turn this around and say you will actually have to use it - so to use and go around these problems:
  • If you want to be testing new apps, you can’t… You’ll actually have to wait for the production version, and forget about internal applications
  • Your company will have to publicize all your API’s that you are using in your applications
  • If you want to take and send a picture - regardless of the bad quality, you’ll actually have to e-mail it to yourself, which is not that bad (obviously if you’re not using GPRS)
  • You can use Microsoft Exchange, but nothing else.
  • You’ll have to use your old Nokia before your iPhone arrives back from repairs
So considering this, either buy an Android or Symbian, both open platforms, both ready to go for all the things above. Nokia possibly better in multi-media and pictures, Android better in OS and application related things.

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