iPhone goes Corporate

Dr. Mike e-mailed the other day to let me know that the iPhone will soon support corporate enterprise systems such as Microsoft Exchange Server.

Apple has given technology managers their iPhone wish list in full in an effort to make its phone more business friendly. The mission: Lure enough enterprises to the iPhone so Apple can hit its 10 million unit goal by the end of 2008.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs kicked off the company’s iPhone SDK event in Cupertino, Calif. with a few remarks, but really let Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, do a lot of the enterprise heavy lifting. See Engadget and News.com for live coverage (event just ended) and Apple’s statement.

What’s notable about that final Exchange point is that the two companies collaborated on making Exchange Server work better with the iPhone (see photo right [above], credit News.com’s Corinne Schulze). This collaboration also occurred on the back end so that iPhone users will still use the same email, calendar and contact apps they do today. Just as an aside: Why can’t these two do this for corporate email? Entourage for the Mac is a sick joke.

Read more here.

Ultra portable

In less than one month we’ll all be heading to Japan to celebrate mom & pop’s 50th wedding anniversary. Sue and Carol did a great job planning the trip, and everyone’s looking forward to it.

Since I want to stay connected during the trip, but don’t want to lug my MacBookPro, I decided to buy the new Asus Eee PC, the 2-pound ultra portable notebook that was a big hit last Christmas.