Today, there's no more doubt, Apple is positioning the iPhone as a direct competitor to RIM's Blackberry. In his presentation, SVP of WW Product Marketing Phil Schiller compared RIM's corporate messaging solution, the "old way" with Apple's "new way" (pictured). In a RIM world, corporate e-mails start from a Microsoft Exchange server (RIM also supports Lotus Notes and Novell Groupwise and Apple does not), generally hosted behind an enterprise firewall to RIM's Network Operations Center (NOC) in Canada and finally to an "old generation" Blackberry mobile device. A complex scenario that is expensive to maintain and set up, and above all "adds risk to reliability, as we've seen from time to time". In an Apple world, the iPhone connects directly to the corporate Exchange server.

"It gets really slow when the NOC goes down", jokes Steve Jobs.

During the Q&A session (video after the jump), Steve Jobs went one step further in its attack against RIM. He chastised CIO's for their lack of concern for security issues with having messages crossing the U.S. border to Canada and raising fears of reliability of RIM's corporate push email solution.

"The other thing that we haven't been able to figure out is why aren't CIOs really worried about security. Every email message that is sent to a RIM device or from a RIM device goes through a NOC up in Canada. Now, that provides a single point of failure but it also provides a very interesting security situation. Where somebody working at that NOC could potentially be having a look at your email. And yet no one seems to be focused on that. We certainly are and we think a direct connection is maybe a little more secure", added Steve Jobs.