Fire the mobile consultants, pocket the change 

I agree with Steve Gillmor about the iPhone having a future in the enterprise.

The marriage with Exchange will help, so will the price and speed boost and the ability to install applications on it, but don't you think the basics of its value have been there all along with simple web apps?

I think about one of those "white papers" I read recently, written for a vertical about mobile apps, and the tone sounded frightened to me, as though all the old PDA software vendors are trying to make hay while they can. "Better not rely on the internet!" it cautioned. "There might not be wireless where you are. Far better to use our mobile PC app with its superduper synchronization doodad and hook into the enterprise database."

There are plenty of situations where a smaller company -- or one trying its wings or dabbling in alternatives -- might not want to enrich the VARs and go to all the trouble of relating every table in every database in the place to that thing in your pocket. And with data plans, even on the slower EDGE network, you could submit a checklist like this little thing I put together tonight with no need for a wireless connection at all. It writes to a MySQL database that could be reported on in any number of ways.

Try it on the iPhone, the big clunky checkboxes show up better. I'm thinking of things like inventory and inspection checklists (maybe using the camera to help document) -- the sort of thing you just don't hear much about unless they've been made into huge huge deals with big pricetags.