Smartphone Security: How To Manage Rogue Mobile Devices

InformationWeek Daily - Friday, May 30, 2008

Will Apple's 3G iPhone Still Fall Short? In April, shortly after I bought my very own iPhone, I blogged about the device's design flaws, pointing out the 5 Areas Where Apple's iPhone Falls Short. With the new 3G iPhone on the way, the question to ask now is whether all the lingering annoyances are being fixed. The answer would seem to be mostly "yes." My two biggest complaints about the current, EDGE-based iPhone are the slowness of its over-the-air Web surfing and the lack of corporate "push" e-mail. The latter problem involves software, not hardware, and anyway Apple plans to upgrade all iPhone users to its 2.0 software, complete with enterprise e-mail support, in June. This means that existing (aka "old") iPhone users like me will be able to access their work e-mails, without forwarding tricks which leave you exposed when you reply. Of course, that's assuming one's company supports the feature, which could take some time. The more vexing iPhone complaint is the slow over-the-air surfing. In point of fact, the iPhone's Safari browser does a much better (faster) job of loading than does the browser on my beloved Blackberry. So the difficulty isn't one of reality, but of perception, because Steve Jobs and the early iPhone ads made it appear as if the iPhone could surf at desktop-like speeds. Not true. What is true is that the 3G iPhone will by definition be getting a speed surge, since 3G mobile networks support faster data speeds than EDGE. How much faster is what we need to parse. This depends, both because the 3G spec defines a variety of data speeds, and because implementations vary by service provider. Thus, for real world purposes, the spec is meaningless; what's relevant in our case is what AT&T Wireless is doing. Find out what AT&T Wireless is doing and whether the 3G iPhone will answer my other complaints by reading the rest of my blog post. Alex Wolfe [email protected] www.informationweek.com
"All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value." -- Carl Sagan
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