Apple iPhone: Finally A Tool For Business

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Around June, I will finally have a reason to buy an iPhone.

Yeah, I know. It’s been out for a while. And it’s not that I haven’t looked at and played with it in the Apple Store either.

But until now, I decided firmly against the iPhone and continued to favor my Blackberry instead. To me it was more a toy (albeit a darn cool one!) than a sales or business tool.

You see, I’m a corporate guy. We use Microsoft Outlook and Exchange for email, calendar and contacts. We use a global address book that’s centrally updated by our IT department.

When I am on the road, I need to have access to email, my calendar, contacts and company address book just like I am sitting at my desk. That means that when a new meeting is scheduled, I want to see it on my calendar right away. And when a new email arrives, I need it to be “pushed” straight to my mobile device - without synching, polling, connecting cables and cradles.

Until now, only Blackberry offered a seamless solution for corporate road warriors. But that’s about to change.

With the new iPhone software that will be released in June, the iPhone will get all of these features as well. Basically, if your company uses Microsoft Exchange, iPhones will start handling email, calendar items and contacts the way Blackberries do.

A few of the new features: push email, push calendar and push contacts and access to your corporate global address and distribution lists and a whole lot of features that make the iPhone easier to manage for Corporate IT departments.

If you’re not bound by corporate standards (or can set your own!), the above likely doesn’t apply to you and you could use Google Mail for email and Google Calendar to keep track of appointments.

How? Well, obviously you could use the iPhone’s built-in web browser to check Google mail and calendar using Google Mobile. This works well, but in this scenario you’re bypassing the iPhone’s mail and calendar programs.

No problem, but if you do like Apple Mail and Calendar (and I do, it’s great stuff) - you could also use those programs to stay ahead of your mail and appointments.

For one, Gmail integrates nicely with iPhone Mail and setup is extremely simple. Getting your calendar synced both ways (so appointments you make in Google Calendar show on your iPhone and vice versa) is a bit more complicated, depending on the type of computer you use.

Mac users should consider a $25/year tool called Spanning Sync, which keeps your Google and iPhone calendars fully synced. I haven’t found a good way to get two-way Calendar sync going for Windows so if you did, let us know in the comments.

Apple finally convinced me. How about you? Are you considering the iPhone? Or are you a Blackberry or other smartphone fanatic? Let us know in the comments!