Beware the dangers of the iPhone's imaginary flash drive capabilities!
InfoWorld writer has an imaginary problem with the iPhone.
InfoWorld's Mario Apicella is the latest entrant in the race to employ the most uneducated invective possible to warn corporate administrators that teh iPhone iz teh ev1L.
What stops me from buying one is that it lacks one vital feature in its remarkable bag of tricks: an Internet connection faster than EDGE (Enhanced Data GSM Environment).
Actually, it does have one faster. WiFi.
When you travel, a faster connection such as HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) or EvDO (evolution, data optimized) is a must-have.
Because no hotels or airports or coffee shops have WiFi.
These days, EDGE no longer cuts it.
The Macalope will say it again: you can have fast or ubiquitous. Pick one.
If Apple had picked 3G the horned one is sure these same silly pundits would be whining that it should have picked EDGE because you can't find 3G everywhere and why the heck is my battery draining so fast?!
From a storage administration perspective, the iPhone -- with its 4GB or 8GB flash drive -- may not seem like much, especially when considering the petabytes of data populating many corporate datacenters today.
Actually, it doesn't seem like anything since it doesn't work as a flash drive.
You'll likely not have to worry about those users who just store songs and make calls on their iPhones, but many will find it all too convenient to store e-mail and work-related files on their new toys.
Gosh, that's going to be really frustrating for them since it's simply impossible unless you -- the poor, besieged systems administrator -- decide to serve up corporate email through IMAP or you think your users can hack the iPhone to do something it doesn't do -- act as a USB drive.
Call me paranoid...
OK, you're paranoid.
And wildly misinformed.
And disingenuous.
And...
Well, we could do that all day.
...but just thinking of how many credit card numbers can be stored on a 4GB flash drive is enough to make me cringe.
OK, we've already established that the iPhone doesn't act like a USB drive, but even if it did, this argument holds no water. If you're concerned about flash drives, then why have USB ports on your corporate computers? You don't have to. Stop playing the victim.
But if you must continue to play the "woe is IT" card, try to do it out outside of the narrow prism of thought that says "the only threats to our enterprise come from Apple products".
It'll spare you the intellectual dishonesty of having to make up supposedly dangerous features the Apple product you're discussing doesn't even have.
Like the ability to act as a flash drive.
Which the iPhone can't do.
Has that point become clear yet?