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Here is an odd story, being reported by Bill Ray at The Register. After spending a whole lot of marketing money trying to convince the Enterprise that the iPhone could be used as a serious smartphone for business people, Apple is backtracking over…of course…money. It seems that someone in Sweden wished to get a tax refund on the applications they bought from the App Store for business use, and Apple told them they couldn’t do it, as the iPhone is a consumer device only and no commercial use of their applications is allowed.

Bill Ray reports…

The issue arises thanks to Value Added Tax – a sales tax applied in slightly different ways across Europe. In the UK, and Sweden where the luckless customer is based, VAT is payable on luxury items* and is reclaimable by businesses: businesses don’t have luxuries. But Apple won’t provide a receipt in order to reclaim that VAT, on the grounds that iPhone applications aren’t for commercial use and therefore can’t be used by a business that would be allowed to reclaim the VAT.

The customer complained, as explained on his blog, and was told that "the specific terms of your agreement with Apple when purchasing from the iTunes Store is that the content may not be used for commercial purposes… any attempts to claim your purchases for tax reasons would be in violation of the terms of sale."

So which is it, Apple…are those 75 pages of business applications in the AppStore just for playing pretend, or are you going to take the next step towards making people take the iPhone seriously in the Enterprise and address the VAT situation?

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Zealot (476 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).