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It says a lot about the state about mobile device convergence that people are no longer wondering when Apple will come out with a PDA and instead when it will start making its own mobile phone.

There has been enough speculation in the last three months from magazines like The Economist, the blog site Engadget and other pundits to believe that Apple's evolving mobile strategy, whatever it is, will have to incorporate some form of telecommunications. With the iPod having recently marked its fifth anniversary, the company seems to have the installed base necessary to extend its reach into other areas. There are people who could go ga-ga imaging how Apple might reinvent the user interface for mobile phones, and certainly it would open up development opportunities for the Mac platform that ISVs haven't had before.

On his blog this week, Jupiter Research analyst Ian Fogg does a better job than I could of examining the various approaches Apple could take: license software to handset vendors like Motorola, create its own “iPhone” sold through operators like Telus or Bell, become its own mobile virtual network operator or just sell an iPhone at retail. Any one of these is possible, but none of them would affect the kind of situation IT managers could find themselves in once Apple's mobile phone strategy takes flight.

Already, companies are grappling with “podslurping,” where users can collect substantial amounts of corporate data on an iPod by attaching it to a network. As we have noted in several stories, there are “endpoint” security solutions that try to block access to this data. Others are just banning iPods outright. That's going to be a lot more difficult once iPhones hit the market and are used by enterprise employees for legitimate business purposes.

Last week at OpenWorld, Oracle announced a partnership with Nokia to bring some of its business applications to the latter's mobile phones. What major software provider wouldn't want to form a similar arrangement with Apple, potentially allowing some of the iPod maker's cool factor to rub off on its own products? It would be up to IT managers to decide whether it was safe to put that kind of data on an iPhone, and what kind of limits users would face. Apple will reap the market potential without having to be the party-pooper amid the market realities.

Even if it waited a year or two before it launched an iPhone, Apple would still be coming at its target audience from a more favourite position. Look at Research In Motion, which is deviating from its longstanding focus on the enterprise segment by releasing a product, the BlackBerry Pearl, which is obviously designed to appeal to the kind of user Apple sucked in years ago.

Although access to Mac applications could be the iPhone's stick, music would have to remain the carrot. That means consumers, who would be primarily in charge of managing what is in fact their own device, will probably put the storage and performance needs of their iTunes content in higher priority to their work content, which has all kinds of storage and security implications. You could ask Apple what it's going to do to make the iPhone acceptable in the enterprise, but I think you'll be waiting a long time for them to call back.

sschick@itbusiness.ca

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