At least one of the two questions I posed last week with respect to Apple's entry into the enterprise hardware market appears to have been answered over the weekend, to Apple's advantage.

The questions I asked were: Is Apple's rapid expansion into the phone business and reconsideration as a business platform causing quality problems in its product lines and will those problems (regardless of the cause) torpedo its chances to expand significantly into the enterprise market?

The question that was answered was that of quality, and it was simultaneously addressed from two equally interesting but entirely different angles. A pair of Swedish researchers with access to a cellular antenna test chamber vetted the iPhone antennas and found them to be functioning perfectly normally. Of course, this sort of test doesn't eliminate any number of other issues which could be introducing performance problems, but those were handily addressed from the other end of the spectrum by a practical and automated online test conducted by Wired Magazine, which revealed a suspicious clustering of problems in areas with heavy network utilization. The conclusion: much of the recent iPhone furor can't be laid at Apple's doorstep (other, of course, than their terrible decision to go with AT&T as the exclusive network provider for the product), but rather that of the network provider, AT&T. Apparently, their 3G network isn't up to speed just yet, and iPhone users are paying for it.

Other than assuaging hurt feelings among Apple enthusiasts, this information doesn't have much practical application; the iPhone is slaved to AT&T, and knowing they are the source of the issues isn't the same as having them solved. But it does suggest, at least, that Apple is capable of ramping up production capacity without causing dramatic product quality problems in their lines.