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Much hoopla has been made of the iPhone. It’s really getting to the point where the product cannot possibly meet expectations. Don’t misunderstand: it’s still going to be a stellar and very popular device. However, to live up to being the phone messiah is nearly an impossible task. Living up to the BlackBerry may be a challenge, too.

Thing is, the iPhone and BlackBerry — seen as pitted rivals in the mobile communications industry — aren’t really in direct competition. The BlackBerry was designed for business use first, personal use second (hence the lack of a camera, among other features). The iPhone is the opposite: personal first, business second. Therefore, BlackBerry probably won’t lose much market share at all.

The biggest drawback to the iPhone as a business tool is that it does not have the capacity to sync work e-mail. Now, this wouldn’t be a problem if you were using, say, Gmail for your work. But most business people have hosted e-mail. Accessing that e-mail from the iPhone — not to mention calendars and other functions synced for a BlackBerry — would be a very difficult task.

“When you look at the iPhone, you look at its functionality, it appeals to a significantly different customer base than necessarily the enterprise BlackBerry users,” said David Garrity, director of research at Dinosaur Securities. “From that standpoint, the point of comparison between the two really isn’t fair.”

We couldn’t agree more.

[CNBC]

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