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Corporate Email Coming to iPhone - Look Out BlackBerry!

by Will Safer on March 6, 2008 at 02:55 PM

The Apple iPhone, soon to be corporate email capable.
One of the biggest knocks against the iPhone has been its inability to handle enterprise email, which is how companies manage the email that is delivered to employees who, for example, use Blackberry's as their smartphones. That's changing now, as Apple today announced it will support the "push" e-mail systems necessary for corporate email to show up on their popular phone and music-playing devices.

People have, of course, been using iPhones for email reading and writing since they were launched last year -- but it's been of the individual Web account variety, typified by Google's Gmail service.

With this new advancement, expect to see more and more people using iPhones for business purposes. That's good news if you're an iPhone user and have been eager to ditch your work-supplied BlackBerry. This isn't great news if you're BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion, which until now has dominated the workplace handheld market.

The release of the iPhone 2.0 software in June will include support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync to provide secure, over-the-air push email, contacts and calendars. The software beta will be available to users by the end of June, so companies can start integrating the application into their systems and get things started with their employees.

The software rollout doesn't mean everyone will immediately be able to use their iPhones for work. Developers will still have to set the systems up for each business and an annual fee will apply to each user who wants the service on his or her iPhone. Still, expect to see many BlackBerry's disappear from workers' belt clips this summer, as Apple continues to be the hot alternative for mobile connectivity.

To read the entire transcript from the Apple event, click here.

From Engadget.

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Tags: apple, blackberry, corporate, email, enterprise, exchange, iphone, research in motion, ResearchInMotion, rim

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