IPhone takes on Blackberry

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Apple today announced a strong push to help businesses incorporate the iPhone, putting RIM's popular BlackBerry handheld devices directly in the iPhone's sights.

Peter Cohen, Macworld

Thursday, March 06, 2008 10:50 AM PST

During an event held today at the company's Cupertino headquarters, Apple senior vice president of product marketing Phil Schiller announced his company's plans to make the iPhone more business-friendly.

"We've been hard at work trying to understand what it takes to bring the iPhone out across the enterprise," he told guests.

The list of features that Apple describes as important to enterprise end users includes "push-based" e-mail, calendar info and contact management; additional support for Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) including Cisco IPsec; and two-factor authentication, certificates and identities.

"Enterprise-class" Wi-Fi with WPA2/802.1x support and tools to enforce security policies were also mentioned. Schiller indicated that IT managers are also looking to help deploy iPhones, set them up automatically, and, perhaps most importantly, wipe the devices when necessary.

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