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Forrester Cites 10 Reasons Why iPhone Isn't IT-Friendly

Forrester has released a list of 10 reasons why Apple’s iPhone is no friend to IT.

You can probably think of a few already: the prohibitive cost, the first-gen factor, and fidelity to AT&T.

Other ick-factors include:

• No native support for business email or calendar syncing (come on, even BlackBerry’s got this down). Apple is apparently working on this and is seeking engineers to show them the way.
• No accommodation for third-party apps. This is actually changing in 2008. Look out for the software toolkit for third-party apps, coming out in February.
• No support for encrypted data
• No hard keypad (which affects accurate input)
• No available case studies of firms that have deployed it throughout their enterprises. And why would they? It’s a status toy in first-gen mode.

The Forrester list (which you, uh, have to pay for) is pretty weak and riddled with things you probably already know.

CMSWire maintains what while the iPhone has broken a bit of ground for the future of mobile technology, it remains a couple of generations away from becoming a serious enterprise tool.

That’s not to say interesting things haven’t already begun to happen. Google Apps became Safari 3-compliant in June, which means it’s now iPhone friendly. (Lack of a hard keypad will inhibit the document-crunching, though.)

And standards are appearing, bearing rhyme and reason for the mobile frontier. Of note, mobiSiteGalore is helping develop mobile-friendly professional sites that adhere to standards it developed on its own.

But if I were you, I’d start watching what’s going on with AJAX. The W3C is working on standards by which AJAX in relation to mobile becomes less hairy, and Sun is trying to do interesting things with its own offering, JavaSX, specifically for handheld devices.

Still stuck on the stuff Forrester said? Fortune synopsized the list nicely.