Time traces

Pent-up demand for the iPhone 3G is manifesting itself on auction site eBay, where eager buyers are bidding in excess of US$1,000 to get what’s turning out to be a hot commodity.

The demand for the iPhone remains high even off the Internet, with lines forming Monday outside an Apple store in New York to buy the limited stock of the devices.

Launched on July 11, the phone sold more than 1 million units worldwide over the first weekend, according to analysts. The demand has continued with carriers, including AT&T in the U.S. and O2 in the U.K., reporting iPhone 3G shortages. The 16G-byte iPhone is priced at $299 in the U.S., with the 8G-byte version priced at $199. In some countries carriers are giving the iPhone for free with contracts.

The bidding for a 16G-byte iPhone 3G on eBay is exceeding $1,000, with one bid ending at $2,325. The average 8G-byte iPhone 3G bid is reaching the $800 to $900 range.

In one auction a potential bidder asked if the iPhone could be shipped to Indonesia, indicating that bids were coming from countries where the iPhone won’t be shipped by the end of this year. The phone is currently sold in 20 countries, but Apple hopes to expand its availability to 70 countries by year-end.

The sellers are advertising the iPhones as “unlocked” to work with any carrier, also providing a link to a recent hack issued to unlock the iPhone.

Apple did not supply enough devices at this year’s launch, creating a demand. During last year’s launch of the first-generation iPhone the company sold 270,000 handsets.

Supplies should normalize over the quarter and the iPhone 3G is set for long-term success, said Mike Abramsky, of RBC Capital Markets, in a report. The company could ship up to 5.1 million iPhones in the quarter.

(Elizabeth Montalbano of the IDG News Service in New York contributed to this story.)

Here’s one way to get your IT manager to approve your new iPhone 3G for work: Get him hooked on it, too.

And how do you do that? By letting him know how Apple’s new smart phone could allow him to troubleshoot the network on weekends as easily as answering a text message in a movie theatre…and by convincing him to go where neither the original iPhone nor the dominant BlackBerry seem to have taken the systems management crowd.

Letting systems administrators monitor and manage desktops, servers and networks from their smart phones isn’t new. Apps such as Rove Inc.’s Mobile Admin and Mobile Desktop and Conceivium Business Solutions Inc.’s MobileControl have been available on the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile for half a decade or more.

But for serious network troubleshooting, smart phones have remained far less useful than even a laptop to most IT managers.

“You need screen real estate, a multitasking GUI, fast network response, a full keyboard, a broad set of easily accessible tools and deep client functionality,” wrote Andi Mann, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, in an e-mail. “Mobile devices have none of these.”

The first iPhone fixed some of those problems. Its CPU, memory and storage surpassed other smart phones. It introduced what was then the largest 3.5-in. diagonal, 480-by-320-pixel screen for a smart phone, and a true, standards-compliant Web browser in Safari.

“Apple got the visual experience right,” said Todd Christy, president and CTO of mobile management software vendor Pyxis Mobile.

The iPhone 3G released last week adds more features that potentially make it a true remote management tool.

The handset has fast, ubiquitous Internet connectivity via Wi-Fi and cellular protocols such as UMTS and HSDPA. Remote network access is possible via a Cisco IPsec VPN that Conceivium CEO Jonas Gyllensvaan said is “equally secure” as the BlackBerry’s. And Apple offers a free, open software development kit to encourage the same independent software vendors it shunned in the iPhone’s first release last June.

All of these changes, along with the addition of Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology, could start to change the view prevalent among systems administrators that flashy smart phones like the iPhone are “executive jewelry” that are a pain to secure and support, according to Ahmed Datoo, vice president of product marketing at mobile management software vendor Zenprise.

That hostility is deep, though, and often rooted in envy. “I’m surprised how often my customers show up with a really old BlackBerry or tell me how frustrated they are to support BlackBerries but not get one themselves,” Datoo said.

But Conceivium’s Gyllensvaan thinks that’s changing. Among the customers he talks with, “the whole mentality has changed in the last 18 months. Before, IT people never got the fun devices. Now, they’re starting to get to test — and approve them — before the executive bigwigs get them,” he said.

This, Gyllensvaan added, could be the “Trojan horse” that leads to mainstream acceptance of the iPhone in many enterprises.

Even the large management software vendors, which have traditionally not bothered to make their software accessible via smart phones, are starting to show interest. This spring, Symantec Corp.’s Altiris released a prototype that lets IT managers view trouble tickets via an iPhone.

And Novell Inc.’s ZENworks software can already be rudimentarily managed via the iPhone’s browser, according to a company spokeswoman.

Gyllensvaan is convinced that platform vendors such as HP, BMC and Microsoft will all start adding “management via smart phone” features “within the next six to 12 months.”

But others remain skeptical that the iPhone or the upcoming BlackBerry Bold herald a more powerful class of smart phones that will bring management by smart phone into the mainstream.

EMA’s Mann, for instance, believes that while “a small group of mobile administrators and on-call support staffs will love these…for anything significant, these mobile clients will be at best a very limited stopgap until they can get to a ‘real’ screen.”

Even if interest grows, can the iPhone 3G overcome BlackBerry’s entrenched position among corporate IT pros?

“The iPhone’s application library is incredibly new, small and weak — right now, there are more applications that transform the iPhone into a flashlight than turn it into an SNMP management console or network packet sniffer,” wrote Avi Greengart, an analyst at Current Analysis, in an e-mail. “Perhaps that will change with time, but I think Apple has to prove itself to this audience.”

Conceivium’s MobileControl is already 100% browser-based, and so it needs no porting to the iPhone, said Gyllensvaan.

But those vendors that would need to specifically rewrite their apps for the iPhone are taking their time.

Waltham, Mass.-based Pyxis expects to release an iPhone version of its mSupport app by year’s end, said Christy. “I expect sales will be very, very small in the next year. The iPhone is very cool, but I don’t think it’s there from an enterprise standpoint yet.”

Or take Idera, whose software for managing Microsoft’s SQL Server database runs on Windows Mobile and Blackberry smart phones.

The Houston company has started development on an iPhone version, but it won’t get serious “until the base of customers for alpha and beta releases exist,” a spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail.

Avocent, maker of SonicAdmin, has no iPhone-specific plans, a company spokeswoman said. Same with Citrix Systems Inc., which sells GoToMyPC.

According to a poll of senior wireless executives last week by Immobile.org, only 4% of respondents thought corporate IT and employees would embrace the iPhone, with 37% predicting Research In Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, would either “keep a firm lock” or “strengthen its hold” on the enterprise.

“We get an insignificant number of requests — easily less than 5% of our customers — for an iPhone version,” said Rove CEO Rob Woodbridge. “We just point them to the generic browser version and send them on their way.”

If you put off buying an iPhone 3G on the day Apple released the new device, you managed to avoid many of the activation woes that plagued early adopters on Friday. That’s the good news. The bad news? You may still have to deal with crowds, even two days after the iPhone 3G made its debut.

We’re getting anecdotal reports that Apple Stores still have lines of would-be iPhone shoppers over the weekend (though nothing like the block-long queues you would have seen on Friday). Senior news editor Jonathan Seff spotted 25 to 30 people lined up outside the Chestnut Street Apple Store in San Francisco at around 1:15 on Sunday afternoon. And senior web producer Curt Poff was all set to head to the Bay Street store in Emeryville on Saturday to pick up his iPhone 3G, but was scarred off by the still formidable size of the crowd.

What about AT&T stores? Well, you may be out of luck there. Bloomberg reports that the stores of Apple’s iPhone partner “have mostly emptied out of inventory” of the new phones. There’s no definitive word on how long it will take AT&T’s outlets to restock their supplies.

So if you want to get your hands on an iPhone in the next few days, your best bet remains an Apple Store. Apple updates the status of iPhone availability on each individual store’s Web page at 9 p.m. each night–you can find a complete list Apple Store locations on Apple’s Web site.