However, I agree with the postitioning of the iphone as a consumer first then business second and am confident that Apple will get around to the “enhancements” that email/calendar users need.

I just switched from a samsung jack to iphone 3g with MS exchange/activesync and love the phone and multimedia functions. Leaps and bounds over samsung and BB. I’m even getting used to the keyboard (but did buy an istore app that allows for keyboard use in landscape mode).

Overall, am very happy with the iphone and I do use it everyday for business and personal use. All of my calendar is on it as well as my work exchange. Yes, the calendar invite is not the greatest on the iphone, but I can wait till I get to my pc/laptop to schedule a meeting.

Great reviews/feedback from you and all and I look forward to reading many more! I am glad I found this site in google search and will keep coming back.

Again, it wasn’t meant as a reivew of one device over another. I know the BB has been around for a LONG time and has this space nailed. That’s not the point of the article. Again, I wanted to clearly point out and identify all of the growth points so Apple knows what its users want and need, IF they are to catch up at all.

I think they can catch up, and can catch up fairly quickly; but they are going to have to tackle some specific tasks. I’ll detail some of those out next week…

Bottom line, Blackberry still owns the business market and for good reason, in my opinion. That’s a difficult market to break into and I think Apple is going the right direction by marketing to regular consumers and the like while building enterprise and business-friendly functionality over time. Blackberry has been in this market for many years now and it’s really not reasonable for Apple to catch up overnight.

You’re right, Chris; provided Apple let’s them step in. It is very possible that Apple won’t let them step in because those functions “duplicate” existing functions on the iPhone. I can’t say that with certainty; but I wouldn’t be surprised. They did that recently with a podcasting app.

I think that Apple has 2 main, business-related problems. One is that Apple has to better integrate the Exchange ecosystem experience (for those users that require Exchange services) into their own iCal/Mail/Contact model. They did a pretty good job getting the basics in place, especially considering the short period of time they’ve been working on it. Just like Apple has a leg up on the music/video player market, MS has a leg up on corporate email because they already own one of the most popular infrastructures. That makes it easier out of the gate for them. Also MS has had 8 years + to make the experience better. Many folk seem to forget how badly it sucked even a couple of years ago (remember the pre OTA days when ActiveStrink was the ONLY choice?). Apple has had something like 7 months to get this done – that’s it. Do they need to do more? Absolutely. Will they? Absolutely.

The second big problem they have is that they started with a personal focus, not a business focus. Despite the hoopla surrounding the notion of the 2.x firmware being more “business” oriented that does not necessarily mean it’s the best business tool or the best corporate tool. It doesn’t have to be – it was very successful as it was – all they had to do was make it business friendly enough. For many people they did that. For Exchange power users, however, they did not. Again, as time moves forward, I believe they will improve the product and features and if not, third parties will step in.

The iPhone has already changed dramatically since its initial release a little over a year ago. Unfortunately, I can’t say that the WM system has improved nearly as quicky, but I’m hoping the current pressure will lead to good changes on that platform as well. One thing’s for certain though – we haven’t seen the end of the changes to either platform yet!

While PI is a great tool, if it doesn’t make use of the standard iCal databases, then that’s a problem, IMHO. My experience has been that apps that do this often create sync issues at SOME point, requiring some kind of uninstall/reinstall and data cleansing activity. I’m not saying that PI will cause these problems at all; but it would be better if it used the iCal databases. It uses the standard PIM databases on the WinMo side. Alex must have run into a technical problem with using them to have done this this way…

As far as editing the appointment on the iPhone, my guess is that if you don’t own the invitation, you can’t edit it on the device. That’s what I’m seeing on my iPhone right now.

As far as search is concerned, Chris Gavula is right. Contacts does have a search function. Calendar does not. Were you talking about the Global Address List (GAL); or were you talking about a search function for Calendar?