So, I bought the iPhone, but I’ve been hanging onto my Treo 600. There it is, tucked into my Tom Binh bag (it’s the only bag I use to carry my Tom Binh in). The Treo gets to ride shotgun with me for one reason only: it supports a little app called SplashID, which stores my – no lie – 475 different website logins, server credentials, frequent flier numbers, and all the other bits of digital identity that I need to survive in this crazy world. SplashID on the Treo syncs with SplashID on the Mac, so whether I’m at the keyboard or on the go, my important digits are never more than a few keystrokes away. For all its whiz-bangery, my un-hacked iPhone still can’t sport a utility like this.

Or so I thought. The good folks at iPhoneAtlas mentioned a Mac app called Password Wallet the other day that looks like it may let me retire the Treo once and for all. Password Wallet has the ability to send an encrypted bookmarklet to the iPhone that is viewable in Safari. I can’t add to or edit my password list, the way I can with SplashID, but just being able to view the list would be close enough to good for me.

The only gotchas I’ve encountered so far: it takes way too long to display all my passwords through the bookmarklet. Even if I export only a subset of about 150 passwords, the list still takes about 20 – 30 seconds to display fully. I’ll really have to slim down to the bare essentials in order to have a usable experience.

Also, Password Wallet doesn’t support as many fields as SplashID, so the import function didn’t bring over all my info. That means I’ll have to go back and manually update a good portion of the records. Still, I suppose it’ll be worth it to save a few more ounces of bag weight.

My friend Galen from ShackPrices.com wondered whether the 120-person office where I work now (and he used to) will switch over to Google Apps. Now, I’m a real fan of the Google apps. Gmail would be a huge boost to productivity, I’m sure, as would the real-time collaboration features in Google Docs and Spreadsheets. However, as much as I’d love to break the cycle of outrageously expensive upgrades to Microsoft Office, I don’t have much hope that we’ll be able to move to any online application provider anytime soon, because there are two major objections that I don’t know how to counter: 1) Google keeps all our data; and 2) we would be absolutely dependent on our ISP to maintain a persistent connection (or we’d have to spend more for redundant connections).

The security of our data is the real killer. For my personal work, I’m happy to take the risk of keeping my email and documents on Google’s servers. For my company, though, it’s just irresponsible to chance a lapse in security that could expose our data to the world. I’m well aware that there are numerous ways we’re vulnerable even with our traditional secure network, but that vulnerability is a different thing entirely from voluntarily releasing responsibility for the safety of our company’s most vital asset to a third party. At least we can take appropriate measures to safeguard our intellectual property when it’s in-house. If that data was on Google’s servers, we’d have no ability to assess its safety.

Even if that issue were resolved, we’d have the problem of relying on our local ISP to keep our connection live 100% of the time. Internet outages would just be absolutely unacceptable if we needed to open all our documents through the browser. At least if our net connection goes down now, our staff can still work.

I wish things were different. If I felt better about the security issue, I could definitely see a scenario where most of the company would use Google Apps, and we would only end up buying the MS Office suite for the word processors. In that case, MS Office would be a professional tool, like Photoshop is for graphic artists. However, for the moment, I don’t thing Google Apps is an appropriate choice for an office of our size and with the kind of responsibilities we have to our clients.

How about you? Is your company planning a move to Google Apps? Or have you already? How have you faced these issues?