On the eve of iPhone’s first day of retail sales, there’s no better time to discuss a product’s legacy – especially when that brand is known for sleek, simple presentations but yet has no track record in phones.

The early reviews (NY Times’ Pogue and WSJ’s Mossberg) indicate that it’s “just okay” as a telephone. Yet, it gets very high marks as the most revolutionary new consumer electronics device to come along since, well, Apple’s iPod.

Sure, iPhone stands on the shoulders of Apple’s precursor products – starting with successes like Apple II and McIntosh and the recent iMacs – but the legacy includes failures like Newton. Each iteration aims to make popular applications more portable and accessible. More importantly, Apple makes them marketable.

In eight months, Apple’s iPhone achieved higher name recognition, excitement and “buzz” than Unified Communications (UC) could muster in more than a decade. Yet iPhone is the latest and greatest instantiation of on-demand service delivery and UC on the market today (tomorrow, actually). Its influence will go far beyond the first wave of purchasers, who treat the launch as an event and the device as a fashion accessory. Picture the shadow people wearing the bright white wires linked to iPod earbugs.

Services “On the Glass”
Early knocks on iPhone revolved around its lack of a physical keyboard. To the contrary, the very lack of peripherals, appendages or dongles – along with an expanded, touch-sensitive viewing area – is the beauty of the iPhone. The longer lasting impact of iPhone will be the high-profile it gives to the simplicity of invoking a multiplicity of frequently invoked entertainment and messaging services on regular basis. Everything is “on the glass,” for all to see and occasionally hear.

Branding aside, the iPhone is less phone than a converged, connected communications and computing device. And while we’re being alliterative, “context” is another important part of the iPhone configuration. For one set of customers, it’s “the best iPod yet” with music, audio and video entertainment on demand. For others, it’s the skinniest portable (dare we say “tablet”) computer around with full-blown Web access, rather than the handicapped WAP-based variety that leads to so many compromises.

And, as pre-sale TV commercials make amply clear, it originates and receives telephone calls at the touch of a “virtual” button.

Not Suitable for the Enterprise
It’s almost amusing that the mavens of corporate computing have seen fit to point out that the iPhone is unsuitable for corporate use. Unified communications and collaboration in the corporate setting is a three-company game involving Microsoft, IBM and Cisco, along with a roster of about thirty partners in the voice processing, call processing, application development and system integration disciplines.

Their major objectives revolve around unified messaging (meaning the ability to render e-mail as spoken words or treat voice messages like an e-mail), informal initiation of audio and video conferencing and using an IM-like client to track the presence and preferences of individuals in the corporate directory. Neither AT&T Wireless (the sole service provider behind iPhone) nor Apple have made these functions a priority, and rightly so.

Crossing the Corporate Chasm
Simplicity will help iPhone’s and its inevitable imitators to cross the line from entertainment to enterprise. It’s the simplest presentation of communications and remote computing options out there and will have a great impact on the design of future user interfaces. I remain very disappointed that automated speech processing and a voice user interface are not part of the product’s core. Yet, I see the wisdom in leveraging the loyal customer base engendered by iPod and iMac into the iPhone fold.

In the next eight months, we’ll learn much about the product’s shortcomings. Users are bound to complain about battery life, data communications speeds, scratched touch screens and (natch!) lack of a keyboard. There will also be yowls surrounding the inability to “sync” with the mainstays of coporate communications, meaning Microsoft’s Exchange and IBM Lotus variants.

In these deficiencies lie opportunities.

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