Apple’s soon-to-be-launched iPhone will be irrelevant to business users because it is a “closed device” and does not support Microsoft Office, a senior executive with the software giant said this week.

“It’s a great music phone, and I’m sure it will be fantastic and have an interesting user interface,” Microsoft’s Asia-Pacific head of smartphone strategy Chris Sorenson told press during a recent visit to Australia. He said: “It’s a great music phone, and I’m sure it will be fantastic and have an interesting user interface. However, it’s a closed device that you cannot install applications on, and there’s no support for Office documents. If you’re an enterprise and want to roll out line of business applications, it’s just not an option. Even using it as a heavy messaging device will be a challenge.”  

Microsoft already has a presence in the mobile phone market with their Windows Mobile platform. As per sources, around one hundred and forty phone models already run Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system. While Apple’s new device is not expected to hit the US market until June, and Australia in 2008. The Windows mobile devices have picked up a significant portion of the converged device market, although they are up against the dominance of Nokia and its Symbian OS, Research in Motion and its BlackBerry OS, and decreasingly, Palm. Apple iPhone would be powered with a customized Mac OS X operating system and Sorenson said that the mobile users prefer familiarity with the Windows Mobile interface.

Posted on April 22nd, 2007 by admin
Filed under: iPhone News