There are a few key draws for the enterprise in the newest Apple iPhone 3G S, which will be commercially available June 19 in the United States.

Of course, the near-doubling of the device's performance, a reported 20%-or-so longer battery life and the ability to connect to multimegabit-speed HSDPA mobile WANs are pretty much good news for everyone.

In addition, there are features that should silence the security-conscious critics who have long preached that the iPhone could not be considered enterprise class until it had a remote wipe or kill feature. Indeed, now, you can locate your iPhone on a map and send it commands to make noises or flash colors until you can actually lay your hands on it. (Uh-oh! I feel a "Law & Order" episode, snatched from today's headlines, coming on!)

If your efforts end up a bust, you can remotely wipe the data from the device.

In addition, there are more than 1,000 new APIs available with the iPhone software developers' kit. Consider, for example, the opening up of the Push Notifications API. Any server application supporting it will be able to connect to the iPhone, then send alerts and other information to it in an "always on" manner, rather than requiring users to pull or fetch data themselves.

This is of interest to Sybase, which has created an "enterprise sandbox" model of securely supporting applications on the iPhone and other smartphones. Sybase isolates enterprise data within its iAnywhere Mobile Office application to ensure the data is encrypted and requires an application password to access it, says Senthil Kirshnapillai, director of product management and mobility. He suggests that this approach mollifies the IT department, which is concerned with enforcing compliance and security policies.

Today, only Sybase applications reside in the sandbox, Kirshnapillai says, but Sybase recently started a partnership program to allow other ISVs' applications into it. SAP became the first partner in March and is connecting its Mobile CRM and Mobile Inbox applications to the secure Sybase platform for the iPhone, he says.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.