The requirement of 3rd party applications to be considered a smartphone is borderline idiotic. 3rd party applications exist on the Blackberry, etc. because the default applications lack some features.
The apps included by default on the iPhone do not lack for much of anything.
First, The iPhones I’ve played with are quiet great. Definitely the best outside the Sidekick for web browsing.
The 3rd party apps for Blackberry are so varied though. I don’t ever expect a medical terminology or legal professional dictionary to be available for iPhone for now. I never expect a real time futures market push browser on iPhone because the iPhone won’t have secure enough encryption for brokerages to trust it to write apps for it. I highly doubt iPhone will have integrated GPS geotracking for farmers on tractors. Citrix push server virtualization. Major corporations have fully mature salesforce applications suites. Oracle, Peoplesoft, SAP, Salesforce.com and a few other database IT corps have fully mature DBA, administration and sales suites for RIM PDAs.
Will Apple ever go after the Novell and IBM Lotus market? I doubt it.
Will Apple ever acquire DoD encryption certification? Not any time soon.
Will Apple have true encryption? Hard to say yet.
Just as Apple survived for a decade due to a small core of niche audio and visual software developers and their user base clung to Macs, Blackberry is never going to lose the corporate customer base. I’m sure hip small companies in AT&T coverage areas will roll over to iPhones and write it off for IT expenses, but I really can’t see IT departments in large companies shelling out the cash for 3G iPhones for quite some time.
RIM 8120’s cost $99 per unit if you buy 100+ at wholesale. You can use VOIP over WiFi and 3G today on the Cingular network.
8GB iPhones cost $299ish each for 60+ pieces at wholesale right now. Jobs and Cingular are shafting customers by crippling the WiFi and 3G Voip options.
Wow. I know a whole lot of techies who would vehemently disagree with you. There have been a lot of people screaming for Apple to open the iPhone. I’m glad they finally did it; should’ve been the plan since Day One.