In one fell swoop yesterday, Apple made the iPhone a more attractive option than anything RIM has out or will come out with for at least the forseeable future.

My headline graphic may be a bit overdramatic, but there’s a strong element of truth to it. In reality, RIM has survived (and in some ways thrived) because there has never been a serious competitor to it in the business market. Microsoft has tried again and again to get messaging right, but each version of Windows Mobile brought little improvement over the last. Apple’s first iPhone was seriously limited in what it could do as far as accessing e-mail and corporate data.

All that has changed, though.

Microsoft has seriously gotten their act together and is now a serious competitor to RIM’s business, but the true shocker is that as of right now, Apple has put themselves right back into the running with a leap. How did a consumer-centric device suddenly become a real competitor?

For one thing, RIM has been dabbling in the opposite space for awhile.

With the Pearl, and the introduction of the Curve, RIM has admitted that a strategy that doesn’t include soccer moms simply won’t work. As much as I think the BlackBerry is a great product, it’s not terribly user friendly. Powerful? Definitely. Soccer-mom ready? Not in a million years.

If you don’t have an Enterprise Server behind it, it’s as good as useless. RIM is trying to rectify that with a new home-based version of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server for families that want to keep a small number of handhelds up and running, but again, does that matter to mom who has an AOL e-mail account? Probably not.

Secondly, the overall experience of the BlackBerry flat out sucks. The e-mail is a lightweight fast and responsive application, but have you ever tried to open an HTML e-mail on a BlackBerry? And before you kvetch about most people not using HTML e-mail, the simple truth is that many people do get lots of it in the course of a day. If I can’t read the e-mails on my device, what the hell good is it?

Apple saw that as the brass ring from day one. The iPhone’s e-mail client, while not as good for managing the e-mails, is light years ahead for viewing them. HTML e-mails look like you’d expect them to when you get them, and the sender expected them to when they sent them. No more running to a desktop computer to see the contents of an e-mail your device just told you that you had. From what I’ve seen, this doesn’t look to be changing in RIM’s future any time soon.

The web browser on the BlackBerry is also abysmal. Again, it’s very fast and responsive (for the most part) but you can’t do any web surfing on it. Most sites have woken up and offered up mobile versions of their content, but in reality they don’t always make it apparent or automatic, and you often have to load the page, scroll around to find a link, then add it. With the iPhone, you just go to the page. If the site owner hasn’t made an iPhone optimized version of their content, you can still view the whole thing as if you were at a desktop computer.

But let’s be honest, there is a certain something to the RIM handhelds. Apple didn’t even bother competing in the first round, choosing to instead go after the conumer market. Hard. 6 million phones later, and here we are watching the growth of a company that has never produced a mobile phone before, mostly done on the backs of consumers. That’s set to change, though.

With the 2.0 version of the firmware, Apple has introduced Activesync (licensed directly from Microsoft) and remote wipe, meaning if your device goes bye bye and it’s a corporate one, they can wipe it from the server and none of your data falls into the hands of the thief. Even better is that they’re also adding push e-mail and contact / calendar synchronization over the air for consumers through the new Mobile Me service.

Licensing Activesync means businesses no longer need to set up, install, and maintain a BlackBerry Enterprise Server. iPhones can be added to the corporate system as easily as a Windows Mobile device, and have much of the same functionality. For all the bluster about how RIM owns the enterprise, I’d sooner commit to a Windows Mobile or Apple platform, neither of which require special software.

It goes deeper than that, though.

On a recent episode of The Digital Home with Don Reisinger, a representative from Microsoft made the stunning observation that people want one device to carry with them that will provide their entertainment and productivity; an all-in-one work and play device, if you will. I couldn’t agree more, Microsoft, but Windows Mobile is definitely not that solution, and if Windows Mobile isn’t, RIM isn’t even in that ball park. Neither of the two are great media devices, despite what Microsoft tells you and what RIM promises will be better.

The iPhone is a terrific media device. The 3.5″ screen, 627 megahertz processor (not sure what speed the 3G iPhone is going to be, but it won’t be slower than the first one) and the iTunes store make it a compelling device if digital media is your thing.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that it works seamlessly on the expanding number of Macintosh computers on the market? Neither Windows Mobile nor BlackBerry can make that claim.

In one fell swoop, Apple has entered territory that was verboten a mere year ago. They won’t take over the enterprise in a few months, but they will make headway there because they’ve eliminated the biggest hurdles to the iPhone’s adoption in the corporate environment. It’ll be interesting to see how RIM responds, but my guess is we’ll just get more of the same from them. They have no idea what consumers want, no idea how to give it to them, and no idea how to design a UI. Their only advantage is corporate inertia, and judging by the number of iPhones I see being used by people in suits, I have a feeling that’s well on its way to changing as well.