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Apple's iPhone opens its arms to business
What does this mean for the BlackBerry?

By Marguerite Reardon

Published: Friday 07 March 2008

Apple has finally granted the wish of business users who have craved the coolness of the iPhone but couldn't live without their push work email.

Until now, iPhone users who wanted to get email on their iPhones had to jump through a series of technical hoops. And as a result, a lot of business users have stuck with their BlackBerrys or Windows Mobile phones.

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But now these business users will be able to get their work email on an iPhone just as easily as they can on a BlackBerry. Apple has announced it has licensed the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol, which will make it much easier to do push email and contacts with Exchange servers.

Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, demonstrated on stage at its headquarters how to activate and set up the Exchange function on an iPhone. The entire set up can be done over the air allowing email, contacts and calendar information to be automatically pushed to a device.

The announcement eliminates one of the barriers the company faced in addressing the business market. It also makes the iPhone more appealing to prosumers, people who buy their own mobile phones for personal use, but also access some business applications, such as corporate email, on their phones.

RIM currently dominates the business smart phone market with more than two-thirds of its 12 million customers coming from businesses and government. Large businesses bought in early to RIM's push email system, which requires large companies to have all their email routed through RIM's own servers. For the most part, RIM's BlackBerry email service has been a huge success. But there are signs the company's dominance could be vulnerable. In the past six months RIM has experienced at least two major email outages.