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What if we told you that a division of NASA — yes, those guys who send people into space — decided recently that they were going to issue PDAs to their employees? You’d probably think: oh, those tech geeks will probably go batty over the iPhone. It’s all cool and technologically and advanced and all that jazz. Well, the division is ODIN — Outsourcing Desktop Initiative — and their initiative is basically outsource their IT. But guess what? They’re going with the BlackBerry 8800.

This is all according to meeting minutes from back in July, which were obtained by the online magazine InformationWeek. In the meeting, defense contractor and ODIN acting project manager Jeff Stephens made the announcement that the iPhone is not “enterprise ready.”

Well, tell us something we didn’t know.

We’re not going to tell you that the iPhone sucks, because it really doesn’t. It’s a technological marvel, and it deserves some of the hype it’s receiving. However, when it comes to using it for business, well, we (and many others) have found it lacking.

To wit, what NASA found:

lack of support from major device management and mobile security software suites, lack of removable batteries, and Apple’s exclusive contract with network provider AT&T.

Yeah, that sums it up pretty well. So this isn’t so much about new news, but more about our position being vindicated by some really smart people.

InformationWeek says that Apple did not return phone calls seeking comment. Well, duh. If we owned a company that made a device that was found lacking by NASA, we probably wouldn’t comment, either. It’s not like Apple can really refute any of the claims, anyway.

[InformationWeek]

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