Jailbreaking iPhones for business use

What I do in my personal time is my business. If I choose to jailbreak my personal iPhone, that is my prerogative. For some reason, this is frowned upon somewhat by the mainstream business community. However, I've run into a case where I am going to have to insist on jailbreaking an employee's iPhone.

Our US creative director is doing some extremely important work in India for a big global client there. However, he is still involved with clients in the US. In India, you rack up mobile phone costs like crazy. Every megabyte is a few bucks. AT&T dosn't offer discounts on Indian roaming.

Our creative director is getting large Powerpoints via email. sometimes as big as 20MB. Normally, this wouldn't be an issue because the Mail reader allows you to only download huge files if you need to. Normally, you don't need to - especially over EDGE.

In this case, he needs to see these PDFs and make comments on them. So he has to download them. When he isn't in the Indian office on WiFi, they can turn out to be hundreds of dollars for each PDF!

The bill came and, of course, finance hit the roof.

The problem is that the iPhone allows him to do important work. The cost however is outrageous.

Needless to say, on his next trip to India, he will be taking a Jailbroken iPhone and will be getting an Indian SIM card to use while he's there.

It just is really a shame that Apple/AT&T can't see the need for this kind of scenario in business. Perhaps they will upgrade this policy in the more business friendly iPhone 3G.