Electronic Armageddon, or Just Good Marketing?

This is the moment that serious Blackberry addicts such as myself have long feared... iPhone or no iPhone? The only good news about this quandary is that coverage of the Paris Hilton incarceration and re-birth might be temporarily on hiatus.

Apparently the primary source of the digital addict's confusion is based on the fact that the iPhone email function may not be of much use to the hip and happening professional. Whether or not corporations allow iPhone emails to be pushed through their servers is the difference between next generation high-tech digital efficiency device and over-priced play thing of the wealthy and infamous. Indeed, according to one law blog that I often visit to remind me how paltry my salary really is, many law firms are leaning away from catering to the Apple crowd in this regard.

As a result, users may have to rely on Web based email accounts, which tend to be slower (regardless of the service provider, which in the case of iPhone is AT&T). For the terminally impatient, such as, well, me, and for the fatally cheap, which is also, me, the sticker price for an electronic toy box may be more than some can handle. (Man, if only I could get Sony to bundle its Reader and the PSP into a single device...).

Even if iPhone receives the same backhanded treatment from corporate America that Apple computers routinely receive, the iPhone does represent one more item that needs to be added to your standard list of devices to consider in serving out litigation holds and discovery requests. Just because a corporate target does not facilitate the use of an iPhone doesn't mean that the corporation's
employees aren't using the iPhone to conduct business.