Traditionally, BlackBerry has dominated the enterprise smartphone market, pushing its devices as being ideal for people who intend to use their phones to stay connected with their jobs. But Apple would like to change that perception.
On Friday, Apple launched a new section on the iPhone landing page on apple.com, according to a story from Apple Insider. On it, the company details the many ways that iPhones can be useful to business professionals. You can check out the “iPhone in Business” site right here.
The page focuses on apps, as one might expect, including those that are found natively on the iPhone – such as Calendar – as well as quite a few third-party apps. Apple breaks them down into various categories that handle lots of different aspects of working life: staying organized, keeping tabs on business, meeting remotely, traveling and managing projects. All told, it details some 36 apps.
All of Apple’s picks are pretty solid business apps, with lots of strong third-party choices in a variety of categories. Among the handiest are those used for creating documents and projects on the go; apps such as Pages for making word documents, Quickoffice Pro for creating Microsoft Office projects in Power Point, Excel and Microsoft Word, and GoodReader for iPhone for reading PDFs and other such files.
It makes sense that Apple wants to push more uses for the iPhone in enterprise, given the fact that the iPad has quickly established itself among businesses. Enterprise users like the iPad’s versatility and large number of apps, and so the device has been finding itself worked into a lot of business operations as a supplementary device. It’s not necessarily replacing other computers, but it is helping businesses in different ways.
The iPhone, on the other hand, hasn’t really found similar popularity among business users, but the device shares a lot of the same apps and features that make the iPad so useful. So it makes sense that Apple wants to push it in that direction: Enterprise is a segment of smartphone sales on which Apple isn’t currently capitalizing. If it can change the iPhone’s reputation and push it as a work tool, it’s possible Apple could see more businesses adopting the device and buying it for employees. The good news is that there are plenty of apps that might make that a pretty good thing for businesses, as well as Apple.
