The first generation iPhone could not impress the Market research firm Gartner for the gadget to be approved for Enterprise use. The iPhone 3G has finally done what its predecessor has failed. Gartner has approved iPhone 3G for Enterprise use with some reservations.While Nokia is left to bite the dust for having failed to make to the Enterprise club even with its E-Class products, Apple is now all set to join RIM and Window Mobile from here.

Gartner’s report on the approval note reads:

We have discovered that the product works via an unencrypted, distributed XML file which could be changed by the end user, Apple indicates that the profiles can be signed, warning the user of their legitimacy, but the most trusted management tools don’t empower the user to make these types of security decisions.

Among the features that impress Gartner about the iPhone 3G were classic browsing experience, html email client and the well performing App Store. The things that worried the evaluators were security concerning firewalls and encryption, absence of file transfer feature, lack of cut and paste feature, short battery life, no tracking record of replied/forwarded emails and high cost of international data roaming, which anyway is a common problem of smartphones.

This approval now makes the iPhone a serious candidate for enterprise-wide deployment, so we should see more and more IT departments opting for the iPhone. Not good news for RIM, who are still struggling to launch a device that can take on the iPhone, while iPhone continues to chip away at RIM’s market share.