AT&T iPhone going corporate on the 21st!
Thanks to one of our tipsters, we just got news that AT&T will be announcing iPhone compatibility to corporate and business accounts on January, 21st. The best part? If you have a corporate discounts, they are still valid! There’s said to be special iPhone data plans of $25 or higher that the business customer must subscribe to. Additionally, there will be no equipment discounts (obviously), and there’s a special activation process you’ll have to run through before going to iTunes and activating. This should be available for current and new corporate and business account holders! Now if we could only get some Exchange support…
Forgive me if I sound stupid but does this mean that its just going to be available to corporate customers? Any new functionality?
Man this is good news for corporate users. I really hope this applies to regular users who want to get discounts on their existing iPhone lines too. If so, I will definitely be taking advantage of this because its a sweet deal.
You can get Exchange support by turning on IMAP on the exchange server.
What this means is that you will not have to install iTunes on every desktop, plus a credit card…but there will be a different process thru AT&T (hopefuly a faster one).
I would like to see how battery exchanges, broken screens, warranty, etc..is handled by their corporate support…hmmmm.many questions…
As far as Corporate Mail support..search on google/here on BGR or yahoo…regarding IBM and Apple and you’ll see the news that Lotus Notes for iPhone is to be announced next week at Lotusphere..
As far as Exchange..I don’t see why it should not be coming soon..as this is a greater chucnk of AT&T Corporate clients…
If you have an old Cingular plan (not old att plan) or employee plan, you can keep it with an IPhone. Its about damn time.
who cares…the corporate world belongs to RIM. It will take a lot more then ‘exchange support’ to change that.
RIM might have market share now but I’ll dump my WM device for this… Gotta start somewhere and this will be a start to getting business users
The hand holding the iPhone in this pic is rly weird… it looks sorta gross…
I guess its a good start, but without wireless contacts and calendaring I can’t see it making much of a difference. It’s like a time-warp back 5 years.
Good news but i got a “good” AT&T employee that gave me my Corp. discount on my personal account. Got to love the people who bend the rules a bit, 18% fyi.
i gve my friend 22% hehe. thtas cool, as a rep for Att i lost some sales cuz iphone couldnt do corp. email but i do agree that world belongs to rim/bb. we shall ee how much of a dent (if any) that will create for new iphone sales. it will create a wave most def though. rim/bb will lose some sales to iphone
Someone else pointed out above that RIM owns the corporate market. There is talk about bringing exchange and lotus notes support to the iphone already. I thought that the specs for the BB9000, reported here to be a touch screed device, were pretty close to the the iphone and as reported here the 9000 is supposed to be a device and not a series. Is there any chance that the BB9000 is not a device but a BB tie in for the iphone.
it will still be a less capable POS compared to many other smartphones; Apple and AT&T just figured out another way of screwing folks.
I’ve been getting my FAN discounts all along. I must have slipped under the radar.
What was the name of that company that had the market on MP3 players before the iPod? Yeah, I can’t remember either.
ha ha my tip I gave ya not to long ago was right
I don’t get whats the big deal about corporate pricing. I am not a iphone hater but I have to admit I a closet blackberry fanboy but without true corporate support I can’t see a whole lot of corporations dropping there bb or windows bassed pda to go with the iphone.
It was mentioned earlier that corporate email can be used if exhange enail is set to imap. This will work but that’s not trully the same as corporate support. We all know email is key but with iphones lack of being able to sync all of your contacts calander task and memos wirelessly on the fly the iphone will never be able to compete in the corpoate marlet.
How the heck is that a solution for full exchange support? That is just email. Exchange is much more than that.
I think that this is great news at the moment.
right now, the only way to do this is to put a primary phone on the corporate account and add the iphone as a secondary phone and then you can get the corp. discount, but not on the iphone parts of the bill.
I like the whole, your company pays for your work BB and then you go buy your own phone. Or you buy your phone and your business pays for your service…that works better.
Just think once Apple has there two years done with AT&T how many other carriers are going to pick this up? This is great!
The whole idea is for it to communicate with micro exchange. Some At&t execs were test driving it and they have been able to rcv their corp email through exchange. From my understanding email was being directly pushed to their handset. It also talks with the computer wirelessly with calendar as well. Make a change on the calendar it shows up on the phone without having to sync the 2 together.
I am a crackberry addict but have been waiting for this moment. I will be definately be test driving the iPhone.
Hmmm Should I buy Monday or wait for the 16 GB 3G model? hmmmm…damn I wish I could have both…..NOW!!!
I don’t get whats the big deal about corporate pricing. I am not a iphone hater but I have to admit I a closet blackberry fanboy but without true corporate support I can’t see a whole lot of corporations dropping there bb or windows bassed pda to go with the iphone.
Well, here’s my situation: I had my ATTWS account. My company starts paying for cell phones for everyone (requiring them). Since everyone already knows and uses my cell number(and I don’t want to change my number), the company takes over my account. Now I never see a bill.
So, to get an iPhone now, I’d have to buy the iPhone on my own, transfer the number to my account, and then submit an expense report every month for cell service. Since we have a “bucket” plan, if I go over my minutes for the month now, it’s no big deal as it would just be covered by someone elses under usage. I’d have to eat the overage if I went out on my own.
I’ve been using one of the stupid free Samsung’s waiting for this since my v600 died.