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“Apple Inc.‘s announcement last week of a new iPhone designed to be more enterprise-friendly provoked a mix of curiosity and concern among IT managers who are weighing whether their organizations should purchase the trendy handheld for business use. The verdict: Apple still has both hardware and software issues to work through before the iPhone is likely to be widely adopted in corporate environments,” writes Matt Hambien for ComputerWorld.

What are the main reasons, you might ask? Well, the article focuses on one, and mentions another in passing. So, these “issues” currently amount to two, one of which is entirely unfounded. I’m actually amazed this article was even published, given that simply by watching the keynote at WWDC 2008 (that’s called “research”) the entire premise of this article is knocked out from under it. But enough of that. What’s this big problem?

IT professionals are complaining that they will have to use iTunes to distribute apps. From the article:

“I don’t want to be carrier-locked [to AT&T], and I don’t want to be forced to distribute apps via iTunes,” wrote Manjit Singh, CIO at at Chiquita Brands International Inc. He added that needing permission from Apple to put an internally developed application on iTunes “won’t be realistic” for Chiquita, which uses BlackBerry devices and has no plans to test the iPhone.”

Newsflash: Steve Jobs specifically addressed that issue in his keynote, saying that the enterprise can authorize certain iPhones to run certain apps not distributed through iTunes, but rather through the company’s intranet. Now, how about complaining about real issues such as the AT&T carrier lock (which was briefly mentioned) or the outrageous data/voice plans associated with the iPhone? Or maybe how the iPhone is apparently being limited in terms of 3G speeds? These are the problems that should be considered for businesses, not ones that don’t exist.

Via [Computerworld]