Apple posted their new ads for the Apple iPhone on Sunday night. I’ve been very excited about this product ever since MWSF. I combed through the ads hoping to find any tidbits people have missed. I didn’t find anything earth-shattering but I did find some promising hints.
In the “How To” ad, I looked closely at the email screen to see how well the iPhone could help me with my work.
The first thing I noticed was that contrary to what a lot of analysts have been saying, Apple considers the iPhone to be ready for business use. The first email reads:
“Heidi Luko
Client Meeting
Just a reminder: Tuesday at 11 am, we’re meeting with Jim, Richard and Tessa in co…”
The iPhone is offering push email from Yahoo! But the fact that Apple is advertising business email use begs the question as to whether Apple is planning to offer more enterprise solutions for the iPhone such as support for Exchange.
The other email that caught my eye read:
“Meghann Haven
Results are in
Here are results for FY05, FY06, FY07. Let’s discuss at Tuesday’s meeting.”
Once again this is showing the use of the iPhone in a business/corporate situation. If you look at the screenshot of the ad, you’ll notice the paperclip icon next to the email, indicating an attachment. What’s interesting is that from reading the short synopsis of the email, which discusses the results for the Financial Years of 2005, 2006, and 2007, we can surmise that the attachment is probably in an interesting format such as .doc, .xls, .pdf or maybe even .ppt. My bet would be an Excel spreadsheet, although this is really just a guess.
Some observers have noted that a mystery app could be looming inside the iPhone. Perhaps it’s one that offers .doc or .xls support, such as an updated version of Pages or even Google Docs.
How unstoppable would an iPhone with .doc and Exchange support be?
Update: Turns out I was correct about most assumptions in this post. The iPhone can view .doc and .xls attachments. It also has exchange support via IMAP.
Update 2: Exchange support has been announced via ActiveSync.