iPhone 3: fit for business?

Paul Ockenden Read more October 7, 2009

The iPhone is undoubtedly a brilliant entertainment device, but the original model had major gaps in its enterprise capabilities. It seems Apple was well aware of these limitations, and in order to grab a bigger slice of the lucrative business phone market it’s added many enterprise features to the newly released OS 3. You’ll get this new OS version on any iPhone you buy today, and it’s a free upgrade for existing iPhone owners (although iPod Touch owners have to pay, which seems a tad unfair). Do these new features cut enough mustard to make the iPhone now a serious contender as a business smartphone?

Let’s take a look at some of the more significant new enterprise-related features, starting with the biggest attraction of all – copy and paste! I realise that Apple’s detractors will be shouting at the page right now, frothing that every other phone has had copy and paste since Year Dot Minus 10, so that its final appearance on the iPhone really shouldn’t be headline news. I have a sneaking sympathy with that opinion, but to anyone responsible for purchasing phones for a large enterprise, copy and paste on the iPhone actually is a big deal, because it at last elevates it to serious contender status.

iPhone copy and paste

As you’d expect from Apple, the cut-and-paste interface is easy and elegant: double-tap within some text and the nearest word is highlighted, with a pop-up offering Select and Select All. Choose “Select” and you see two draggable bars that expand the selection to cover the text you want to copy. At that point you can click Cut or Copy in the menu above your selection, although of course Cut only becomes available in an application that allows you to edit content – you wouldn’t see it on a web page or a game help screen. Best of all, this cut/copy facility works with images and text.

Once you’ve cut or copied some content you can go to any other app that accepts input and double-click where you want to paste the text or graphic, at which point a Paste menu will appear. Double-click in an app that isn’t looking for input and you won’t see the Paste menu, so it’s all very straightforward and logical. One tiny fly in the ointment is that the copy function works slightly differently in the Safari web browser – you have to hold your tap for a second or so to get the select menus, rather than double-tapping. It’s disturbingly un-Apple-like to tolerate two clashing modes of interaction such as this, even though I understand the reason: double-clicking on a web page could trigger some navigation event that shoots you off to another page.

In the spotlight

Enterprise users will be delighted to learn that the iPhone now has a proper search facility, courtesy of a mobile version of Apple’s OS X Spotlight indexing system. Oddly, rather than accessing this from an icon like other iPhone tools, you must swipe the main home screen to get to the search screen, where you’ll see Search sitting on the left. It searches across all content on the device, and if you click a returned result it opens that document in the relevant application. Once again, it works exactly how you’d expect (and yes, once again, other phones have had search for donkey’s years!)

In addition to this global search function there’s also now a search facility available within individual email mailboxes, but its user interface is hidden, which is a rather serious usability howler – you need to first open an individual mail account, go to its inbox, then scroll up above the first mail message where you’ll find the search box. In a user interface that’s generally so easy and intuitive, this gaffe really irritates. Sorry, Apple, but I think you could have done much better here.
What’s good about this email search, though, is that, as well as searching the messages stored on your phone, it will also (optionally) extend a search across the messages stored on the server. Once again, something that other platforms have had for a while, but it’s great to see it appear on the iPhone.

The enterprise email facilities have been beefed up a bit, but the best parts are still heavily tied-in to Microsoft’s Exchange Server, so that if you use any alternative enterprise mail platform you’ll miss out on goodies such as invitations and many of the device management functions.

Amazingly, though, despite this tight integration with Exchange it still isn’t possible to set your “Out of Office” message from the iPhone, which is almost (but not quite) a deal-breaker for me. I’m always forgetting to set my away message while in the office, and only remember when I’m sitting on a train or in an airport lounge and a whole host of work-related emails arrive in my inbox. Fortunately, for anyone who’s running Exchange Server 2007, there’s a neat little 59p app available from the App Store called Oofy, which gives you full and easy control over your “Out of Office” message – I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I’m constantly amazed at the proportion of people working in the professional mobile field who don’t realise that centralised management of iPhones is even possible

Other things missing from the Exchange integration include flagging messages for follow-up and task synchronisation. I use message follow-up flags quite a lot, so I really miss them on the iPhone, but I’d guess that only a minority of Outlook/Exchange users use them and I can understand their being low priority for Apple.

The iPhone centralised management tools have also been beefed up. They still lag behind RIM’s Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) or Microsoft’s Mobile Device Manager, but there’s a lot you can now do to control a fleet of iPhones (I’m constantly amazed at the proportion of people working in the professional mobile field who don’t realise that centralised management of iPhones is even possible). New control policies available under OS 3 include stuff like disabling the camera, vital for people working in high-security areas, and the ability to set a maximum time for which the device can be left unlocked.

iHate iTunes

I can’t help feeling that the one thing holding back the iPhone in the enterprise arena is iTunes. It’s horribly clunky software – especially when running on Windows – which really doesn’t belong anywhere near a business PC, and yet iTunes is an essential component of the iPhone setup. You can’t officially activate one without it, and it’s needed, too, for subsequent device updates – even for installing enterprise applications. What’s desperately needed is a proper desktop manager for the iPhone, and I don’t just mean iTunes without the music and with a pinstripe skin. It needs to be re-written from scratch with just those features business users need and none of the CPU-sapping rubbish.

iTunes needs to be re-written from scratch with just those features business users need and none of the CPU-sapping rubbish

On top of the device-management features provided via Exchange, OS 3 also supports WPA/WPA2 Enterprise wireless networks. Unlike the WPA-personal security you might use on your Wi-Fi router at home, the iPhone’s WPA Enterprise security uses 802.1X authentication, which enables the device to work in RADIUS server controlled environments. You can also use certificate-based authentication for added security.
The iPhone has always had fairly good VPN client support, but in OS 3 that’s been slightly improved so you can now use on-demand certificate-based IPsec VPN connections. The device can also use pass-code based IPsec, L2TP, and good old-fashioned PPTP (point-to-point tunnelling protocol). It’s nice to have PPTP included since many enterprises still employ it in their legacy systems, but client support is getting thin on the ground nowadays.

For configuring live devices, there are basically two methods available on the iPhone. For Exchange Server-connected devices you can push policies wirelessly to the device, which means you can enforce those policies fairly strictly. The alternative is to use the iPhone Configuration Utility on a desktop PC or Mac to build a configuration profile (basically, an XML file), which you then distribute either via email or a web page. Obviously, employing XML profiles requires a degree of co-operation from your users, as if they know a particular update will restrict their ability to visit www.winkspider.com (I think that was the name) they might not be too keen to help you deploy it…

Encrypted profiles

A useful feature introduced in OS 3 is that such configuration profiles can be signed and encrypted, so once installed they can’t be removed without an administrator password, and can only be overwritten by another profile with the same identifier, which has been signed by the same copy of the Configuration Utility. Don’t get me wrong, in terms of management and policy granularity the iPhone is still light years behind, say, BlackBerry’s BES system, but these changes in OS 3 are a good start at providing a platform that’s probably secure and manageable enough for a great many companies.

I still long for an iPhone with a physical keyboard

Other OS 3 improvements include a landscape-orientated onscreen keyboard, available within email, notes, SMS and the Safari web browser. I expected this would increase my typing accuracy but, to be honest, I can’t say it’s had much effect and I still long for an iPhone with a physical keyboard. You’ll also find that internet tethering is now available, allowing you to use your iPhone as an HSDPA data modem for your laptop, although at £15 a month for up to 3GB, or £30 a month for 10GB, you might decide it’s both easier and cheaper to carry a USB data dongle.

I said above that the iPhone has so far been a great entertainment phone but not really suitable for enterprise deployment – has OS 3 changed my opinion? Yes it has, and I’m now happy to give iPhone the thumbs-up as a business device, if rather tentatively. There are still significant holes in the feature set offered (like that lack of “Out Of Office” control), and Apple needs to keep an eye on the user interface since some of these new features compromise the company’s position as usability champion. But despite such shortcomings, the version 3 iPhone now warrants serious consideration by anyone specifying or designing a corporate mobility system.