Update: If you’re looking for information how my progress (or lack thereof) in attempting to get Lotus Notes/Domino to work with an iPhone, please visit this article instead.  10/1/2007

With all the hype around the iPhone I find myself asking … well, myself… if I “need” one. I currently am using the Nokia E61i and really like it. I’ve got Good software to sync my calendar, email, contacts and to-do’s wirelessly and I’ve been able to connect it to our Cisco system to get my desk phone calls on the device (which is slick!).

So why would I want to give up all that? Two reasons:

1. The Nokia E61i is heavy and wide.

2. The Nokia E61i isn’t an iPhone.

I’m sure I’ll love the iPhone’s interface. I’m sure I’ll love having some of my music, podcasts and movies on-the-go with me. I’m just not sure how to reconnect myself to the business world once I move away from the Nokia E61i.

Which started a whole frenzy of activities. Let me walk you through it, link style:

• First, I wondered what Apple says about getting ready for an iPhone
• Reading that they plan on operating with Exchange/Outlook gave me hope. Worst case, I should be able to connect Outlook to a Domino server and possibly connect to the iPhone somehow. But I wondered if anyone at Lotus was talking about it.
• That pointed me to a Martin Scott product that looks like something I should have tried a long time ago. It looks like the type of tool I might need to pull off the iPhone to Notes trick, so that gave me some hope.
• And a Google search or two pointed to lots of other ideas about how to make this work, assuming you can find a way to connect Notes to iCal, Address Book, etc. on your Mac. That, along with exposing my mail file through POP3/IMAP would give me most of what the Good service does, just not nearly as conveniently.

So in the end, I have no answers. (Sorry to those of you who got here by searching.) But it looks like there is some hope. Maybe I’ll just have to get one an experiment!