Let's make no bones about it - the iPhone might look like a consumer tech device but it is Apple's first serious foray into the office in some time. Features such as Exchange Activesync support, push email and VPN connectivity including Cisco's IPSEC protocol are clearly designed to get business interested in the iPhone and, by association, the Apple brand.

So, does Apple succeed? There are some elements of the iPhone launch that will not have filled Apple's potential corporate customers with confidence. I'm basing these conclusions on my own observations so far and some real world experience.

Firstly, battery life is a difficult feature to evaluate. This is because the iPhone doesn't neatly fit into a specific product category. Here's a typical day of use for me. I typically charge my iPhone overnight. I get up, check some email over WiFi (but 3G is switched on as I never turn it off) and then head off to work. I catch a train to work so I fill the journey with about 30 minutes of video viewing. In a normal day I would make and receive a dozen phone calls and receive about 100 emails. On the trip home I watch some more video or listen to music. I browse the web and view about 25 pages of content throughout the day. By about 8.00PM the iPhone is close to fully discharged.

Now, that battery life might seem crappy for a phone but I've been doing more than make a few phone calls. I've been using it as an entertainment device and communicator. I suggest that the iPhone's battery life would be pretty good if all those non-phone functions were disabled.

Push email over the Mobile Me service has been reliable for me but I know that many others have not that experience. What I can say is that IMAP access to several different email accounts has worked well for me.

I've had an opportunity to connect to a Cisco VPN over IPSEC. I was surprised that this "just worked". Creating the VPN connection was easy (you'll need a network administrator to provide some configuration information) and I was able to log in and maintain a stable connection with access to the same services I have with a "proper" computer.

Where does the iPhone fail? The iPhone's email client is somewhat anaemic. One reason is that there's no system-wide cut, copy and paste functionality. There's no easy way, other than re-typing, to take text from different source emails and paste it into other messages.

Secondly, there's no user-accessible file system. In other words, you can't save documents from emails to the iPhone for later access. The only way you can take documents with you on your iPhone is to email them to yourself and access them from your email client. Compare that to Windows Mobile and Palm OS smartphones - saving documents for later access is part of the system.

None of the issues I've described is insurmountable. Building a better email client is possible and could be delivered through a firmware update to the iPhone.

The iPhone doesn't run a special operating system. It runs OS X with a new user layer so that the user interface is customised to work with the iPhone. In other words, the OS X file system is actually there - Apple has chosen, for their own reasons, to hide the file system from the user. Similarly, cut, copy and paste exist in OS X but are hidden from iPhone users.

Apple must address the issues with its email client and access to the file system. Until those shortcomings are rectified the iPhone is likely to leave business users feeling a little short-changed.