Over at Forbes.com, there’s an article on a worthwhile topic: iPhone applications for businessfolk. There are, however, some things about the piece that I just don’t understand. Such as the fact that it seems to argue that buying an iPhone will let you save money on the pens and paper you’d otherwise tote along when you travel. ($200 to $300 for the phone plus two years’ worth of service fees make for a hefty investment to avoid buying a few Bics and memo pads.)

More important, I’m also mystified by this bit:

Gregg Brockway, president of TripIt, a start-up that organizes travel itineraries online and on mobile devices, says iPhones are the greatest gadgets that business travelers don’t know they have. “Smart-phone sales are up 80%, so the whole category is on fire,” Brockway says. “But only a third of business travelers who have a smart phone realize that they can access the Internet. Of the business travelers who do realize, only 50% of them use their phones to actually access the Internet.”

I assume Brockway (who, by the way, runs a clever and useful service) is quoting some actual survey rather than sharing his gut instinct. But that’s still an astonishing assertion: Two-thirds of the business people who own smartphones don’t realize you can get on the Internet with them. And of the one-third that do understand you can get on the Internet, only half do it. Do the math, and Brockway is saying that about 83% of people who own smartphones aren’t using them to get online.

Now, “smartphone” and “access the Internet” are both squishy terms. There’s no truly definitive way to define what a smartphone is: I used to say they were phones with physical QWERTY keyboards, but the iPhone, BlackBerry Storm,  and other touchscreen phones don’t have them, and are undeniably smartphones. It’s possible that Brockway is defining “smartphone” broadly enough to include cheaper, simpler phones that have some sort of Internet capability.

A broad but entirely accurate definition of “access the Internet” would include Web browsing, but would also cover e-mail, instant messaging, and a bunch of other applications that send bits over the Net. Let’s assume, though, that Brockway is defining “access the Internet” much more strictly–say, to mean using Web sites on a phone. (That would be inconsistent with the premise of the Forbes story, which is about downloadable iPhone applications, but let’s ignore that inconsistency for the moment.)

Then there’s the fact that Brockway says his stat involves business travelers, not the great unwashed masses of phone users. You–or at least I–would surely assume that business travelers as a group are particularly sophisticated about technology usage, not more dunderheaded than the average Joe or Jane. But let’s assume that the reverse is, surprisingly, true–that business travelers are less likely than most folks to be aware that their phones can access the Internet.

So it’s possible that Brockway is saying that among the very large pool of business travelers who own Internet-enabled phones of all sorts, only a third know that their phones have browsers, and only 17 percent are using said browsers. I suppose it’s not utterly inconceivable that that’s true, especially since the phones involved would include some with browsers so rudimentary that it wouldn’t be worth the bother. I still suspect, though, that either (A) the number is just plain wrong; or (B) the definitions of business travelers, smartphones, and/or Internet access are so odd as to make the results less than revealing; or (C) both.

But the Forbes story isn’t about smartphone owners in general. It tells us that the point of Brockway’s factoid is that “iPhones are the greatest gadgets that business travelers don’t know they have.” Is the story saying that most iPhone users don’t know that the iPhone has Internet features? Despite the “i” in its name? Despite the fact that it’s hard to get into its phone features without laying your eyeballs on the browser icon? Despite all the advertising for the phone, most of which emphasize Net-related functions? Despite the fact that it would be kind of goofy to spend hundreds of dollars for an iPhone and use it only to make calls and/or listen to music and watch video? Despite, above all, the fact that the iPhone remains in most respects the best Internet phone on the planet?

Sorry, I don’t buy it. Virtually all iPhone buyers must know that it can get on the Web, and a sizable majority must use that capability at least once in a while. (Not that it’s remotely the last word on the subject, but among the iPhone owners who took Technologizer’s recent survey, the Web features were more heavily used than the phone ones.) They just can’t be that dumb.

And if the point isn’t that iPhone-owning road warriors aren’t aware it’s an Internet phone, but rather that there are scads of nifty business-related apps that most people don’t know about? Well, that’s surely true, and it’s good fodder for an article. But it doesn’t have anything to do with Brockway’s mind-bending stat.

 
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