After several months of anticipation, the wait for the arrival of the iPhone in the UK is over. At a press conference in London today, Steve Jobs – the Chief executive of tech giant Apple – revealed that the iPhone will go on sale in the UK on November 9th. He also confirmed that the unit will be supplied by network provider O2, and sold exclusively through the Carphone Warehouse.

Amid massive hype and marketing campaigns, Apple may have a tough time breaking into an already saturated mobile phone market. Surprisingly, there will be no operator subsidy, meaning that technophiles will have to pay the princely sum of £269 to own the coveted device - for the hoards of dedicated Apple followers expecting a free iPhone, this will sorely disappoint. Over and above the expense of purchasing the handset, it is likely that customers will be tied into a lengthy and expensive contract with O2, which will result in bills of up to £700 for iPhone services over the duration of the contract.
continue reading "Apple iPhone to go on Sale in the UK on November 9th"

Andy Ihnatko makes me feel old. While I like my devices to do what they say on the box, i.e. my smartphone is a smart phone, he goes and writes something that makes so much sense, but I still haven’t come entirely round to his way of thinking*:

So really, the point of the phone is just to keep me connected to the services and features I’m actually interested in.

Note that he doesn’t mean actually making and receiving calls. He’s talking about staying in the loop, no matter where you are — with Bloglines, Technorati, Google and Yahoo! by tuning into their mobile offerings.

Lives are so incredibly fast-paced in the modern world, and it is completely logical for our mobile devices to help keep our need for information under control. If one device, the smartphone, can manage these demands — via platform-independent applications and the Internet — AND handle actual telephony well, the convergence of analogue (by that I mean voice) and digital two-way communication makes perfect rational sense.

What do you use your smartphone for? Do you use all the Web-connected applications he lists in his article to stay connected, or are you more ‘old-fashioned’ and see your smartphone as a phone first and mobile digital communications device second?

* Frankly, I think it’s more the high data charges that have almost completely stalled my adoption of the services he speaks of.

The IT-Observer has printed a long-ish release from Pointsec Security on information security. The key to safe (in terms of data security) device disposal appears to be: encrypt, encrypt, encrypt.

The Companies Act in the UK, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US (which a growing number of UK organisations, especially those that trade with the US, are implementing) mandate that high levels of security and compliance are introduced in companies both large and small.

Despite this, recent research has shown that 55 per cent of mobile devices in active use by UK organisations are unprotected.

Three quarters of respondents in the DTI Information Security Breaches Survey of 2006 stated that the theft of a laptop or mobile devices had been their worst security incident - proving extremely problematic, not just in terms of reconfiguring their systems, but the unknown long-term use of the data and public perception of trust.

On thinking about it, this is so simple I can’t believe I didn’t think of it first. Then again, I can be kind of old school. The Smart PDA has an article on turning your smartphone or PDA into a ‘portable computer’. What the author means is using your smartphone or PDA much like some people use flash drives — those that store mobile versions of most-used applications, allowing the user to work on documents at any desktop or laptop, completely eliminating the need to synchronise multiple document versions.

What you’ll need is an application that tricks the computer you’ve connected your device to (via USB) into treating your device’s memory card as a separate drive (without synchronising), and another application that launches software stored on your device’s memory card.

This is a brilliant idea, provided you’re not one of those people who loses or changes their mobile devices easily!

TotalPDA does not vouch for this software in any way.

Microsoft are to announce the new Windows Mobile 6 platform at next week’s 3GSM trade show in Barcelona, although devices with the new system aren’t expected to ship until spring. There will be three versions — Windows Mobile Professional for Pocket PC (touchscreens), Windows Mobile Standard for smartphones (non-touchscreen) and Windows Mobile Classic (for PDAs without integrated phones).

Windows Mobile 6 is expected to be backwards-compatible with version 5 software, and the article adds another tidbit. Although there won’t be a VoIP application coming standard with Windows Mobile 6, the system will be able to handle VoIP telephony if network carriers / device makers decide to add such support.

TowerGroup predict that cyber-criminals and identity thieves will be focusing on mobile phone banking this year. According to them,

“Over 200 mobile viruses have already been identified, a number that is doubling nearly every six months.”

They note that the current mobile commerce options offered by the financial services industry are not robust enough when it comes to security. More people are using their handhelds for financial services and other mobile commerce functions, and so “… the mobile commerce industry beyond financial services players must step up to take more aggressive and immediate action to circumvent the potential of fraud and theft.”

It’s a bit worrying when a Microsoft engineer starts an article about mobile security with

“Security” and “mobile application development” rarely appear in the same sentence.

Never fear, it’s just his way of getting your attention. The convenience factor of handhelds makes the application of robust security procedures more than a little difficult. However, it should always be noted that a handheld is a computer, just like your desktop or laptop, and we all know what chaos ensues when an employee loses a laptop!

As author Marcus Perryman notes,

User interface design is very tricky for the restricted screen real-estate and the limited input of a numeric keypad. It’s important to get the balance right between the amount of information displayed and the number of key presses needed to access data. Passwords are an integral part of this challenge. Making users enter a 10 digit alpha numeric password every 30 seconds might mean the corporate security officer gets a good night of sleep, but it’s likely to make users simply switch the device off and use pen and paper. Plus there is always the risk of users taping the password to the back of the device (I’ve seen it happen!).

In these circumstances, the trade off might consist of removing some restricted data from the mobile application in order to allow for a shorter password. Or, consider a two stage lock in which the user is required to enter the full password at less frequent intervals and a short PIN number to confirm the user identity at more frequent intervals. Biometrics are available for some devices, and other two factor solutions such as a smart card or card swipe can also simplify user input.

Windows Mobile does provide applications for developers to write secure mobile applications — Cryptography Application Programming Interface (CAPI) and Data Protection Application Programming Interface (DPAPI). So, if you’re a business user, make sure that the applications you download contain the necessary security precautions!

One range of PDAs that uses biometric security is the HP iPAQ 2700 series.

A couple of years ago I would’ve scoffed at the idea of downloading a portion of the World Wide Web and keeping it for later. These days, when my smartphone takes a 2GB storage card, downloading a 5MB programme and a 50-plus MB ‘web pack’ doesn’t seem so silly after all.

Webaroo is a company that does just that (their latest version is 1.3). I think it’s a brilliant idea (though, judging by the comments on the mini-review on TechCrunch, not new). Most of us don’t always need the absolute latest information, and if we’re thinking of doing some offline browsing, it’s going to be in a situation when Internet access is either non-existent, patchy or prohibitively expensive.

In the UK, for example, there are Wi-Fi hotspots all over the place, but they are’t exactly cheap to access, and most of them aren’t secure, so I won’t want to be doing anything involving passwords and accounts anyway, i.e. I will be doing aimless surfing and news reading. If I was waiting to meet someone at a coffee shop and I had a web pack on my phone to read — say Asian news — I could, for free.

At the moment, they only support Windows Mobile 2003, 5.0 and Pocket PC phones. To install Webaroo on your desktop or laptop, you’ll need to be running Windows XP SP1 or 2000 SP4. So it’s quite limited, but I presume they are working on expanding their market.

TotalPDA does not vouch for this software in any way.

News from PDALive that DataViz will be releasing a Documents To Go Mobile Office Editor for Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphones. This enables users to create, edit and view Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, as well as view PDFs and unzip files on the fly.

You can download a preview from the DataViz website.

Further to the news last month about a MMS exploit crashing your mobile, F-Secure have done a bit of research and discovered that the exploit affects those who run the ArcSoft MMS composer (versions predating August 2006).