Mobile Concerns

Google's Android mobile operating system (used to power the HTC G1 smartphone), is vulnerable to a security exploit. The exploit was discovered by ISE (Independent Security Evaluators), an independent consulting firm focused on improving system security. The vulnerability has come about through Google's use of an unpatched version of an open source software library in Android. The impact of the vulnerability is that users of Android's web browser could visit a malicious web page, giving the attacker access to information available to the browser including cookies and passwords. Technical details of the vulnerability will not be made available until a patch for the exploit becomes available.

In an interview with the Mercury News, HTC CEO - Peter Chou - forecasts that HTC will sell more than 600,000 of the Android powered G1 smartphones. He predicts that within 5 years, the percentage of mobile devices that are smartphones will increase from the current 15% to 40-50%.

Time to get your latest smartphone software application out there.

Following Apple's 4th quarter report, Steve Jobs has said that iPhone 3G sales have eclipsed Blackberry sales for the most recent quarter, making Apple the no. 3 mobile phone vendor. Whether Apple can sustain this growth in coming quarters remains to be seen but there is no doubt the iPhone 3G is this year's "must have" device.

Now this is interesting. I have just found Net60 from RedFiveLabs - an implementation of the .Net Compact Framework designed to run on an S60 Symbian mobile. It allows you to do your development in Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 and builds an SIS file for you so you can deploy your application on your mobile device. You can use C# or VB.Net from Visual Studio and make use of the .Net Compact Framework class libraries. You can also make Symbian API calls using the the .Net Platform Invoke (PInvoke) services.

Speaking in Sydney (Australia), Kaspersky Labs founder Eugene Kaspersky says that he has seen smartphone software being written in developing countries, that is designed specifically to increase call costs for the end user. Hopefully not a market readers of this blog will want to get into. What I found most disturbing was that he says it is the telecommunications providers in these countries who are paying to have this software written.

Fortunately, a lack of understanding about writing software for the popular mobile platforms has stemmed the proliferation of malicious smartphone software, though he expects this to change in coming years. I am sure he is right.

BTW, Kaspersky Labs sells AV protection products for both Symbian and Windows Mobile smartphones.

There are reports that Orange in the UK has suspended shipments of the Blackberry Bold to customers due to problems with the device's software. I don't want to focus on RIM specifically, but rather explore the issue of software reliability on mobile devices. Why should creating software for mobile be any more challenging than for the desktop or the enterprise? I believe there are four factors at play here:

The current crop of devices and their operating systems are still severely limited in their ability to manage scarce resources (processor, memory, threads);

Applications for mobile are typically integrated very closely with other applications on the device such as PIM;

Mobile devices can connect using a variety of protocols. Not only do they connect to the Internet but they also support voice, sms and mms and;

Mobile applications may make use of device hardware such as cameras and GPS, that can vary across device makes and models.

These four factors increase the complexity of writing software for mobile and these are the issues mobile operating system makers should focus on to simplify the work for mobile application developers.

I was looking at Google Trends and thought it would be interesting to see how searches for information on the latest mobile development platforms have changed over the last year. I decided to look at searches for "Android SDK", "iPhone SDK" and "Windows Mobile 6 SDK". Note that the results do not reflect the relative volume of searches between each search term. Instead, they show how the search volume for each term has varied over the twelve months. Out of the three terms used, "iPhone SDK" had the largest search volume by a factor of 10. What I found interesting was that searches for Windows Mobile were pretty much constant throughout the period. Searches related to the iPhone SDK peaked suddenly in March - when Apple announced that the iPhone would soon support Exchange for business e-mail - and again in June 2008 with the release of the iPhone 3G. Searches related to Android peaked with Google's announcement of the platform in late 2007 and again with the release of the first Android enabled handset in September of this year, but whether this interest will be sustained remains to be seen. My interpretation - interest in iPhone application development has shown major growth over the last year increasing over 6 times, while interest in Windows Mobile Development has remained stable. As for Android, there are a lot of people watching what is going on here, but I'd question how many hardcore developers this platform really has.

Following on from the previous post, I thought it may be useful to compare the form factors and features of some current mobile devices.

Note: Dimensions are in mm and weight is in gr.

Manuf.	Model	H.	W.	D.	Weight.	Res. (H)	Res. (V)	Camera (Mpx)	GPS	Keyboard
Apple	iPhone	115.0	61.0	11.6	135.0	320	480	2.0
Apple	iPhone 3G	115.5	62.1	12.3	133.0	480	320	2.0	Yes
HTC	Touch Diamond	102.0	51.0	11.4	110.0	240	320	3.2	Yes
HTC	Touch HD	115.0	62.8	12.0	146.4	480	800	5.0	Yes
HTC	Touch Viva	104.5	59.0	15.8	110.0	240	320	2.0
HTC	Touch Pro	51.0	102.0	18.1	165.0	240	320	3.2	Yes	QWERTY
HTC	Touch Dual	107.0	55.0	15.8	120.0	240	320	2.0		Numeric
HTC	Touch Cruise	110.0	58.0	15.5	130.0	240	320	3.0
HTC	Touch	99.9	58.0	13.9	112.0	240	320	2.0
HTC	G1	55.7	117.7	17.1	158.0	480	320	3.2	Yes	QWERTY
HTC	P3300	108.0	58.0	16.8	130.0	240	320	2.0
HTC	P3400	109.0	58.0	17.7	126.0	240	320	2.0
HTC	P3470	108.0	58.3	15.7	122.0	240	320	2.0	Yes
HTC	P3600	108.0	58.2	18.4	150.0	240	320	2.1
HTC	P4350	109.0	59.0	17.0	168.0	240	320	2.0		QWERTY
HTC	P6300	129.7	69.8	18.8	200.0	240	320	2.0
HTC	P6500	137.4	72.9	20.5	220.0	240	320	3.0	Yes
HTC	TyTN II	112.0	59.0	19.0	190.0	240	320	3.0	Yes	QWERTY
HTC	S620	111.5	62.5	12.8	130.0	320	240	1.3		QWERTY
HTC	S710	101.5	50.0	18.6	140.0			2.0		QWERTY
HTC	S730	105.8	51.0	19.4	150.0	240	320	2.0		QWERTY
HTC	S740	116.3	43.4	16.6	140.0	240	320	3.2	Yes	QWERTY
Blackberry	Bold	114.0	66.0	15.0	136.0	480	320	2.0	Yes	QWERTY
Blackberry	Curve	107.0	60.0	15.5	111.0	320	240	2.0	Yes	QWERTY
Blackberry	Pearl	107.0	50.0	14.5	89.0	240	260	1.3	Yes	Numeric
Blackberry	7100g	117.0	59.0	21.0	120.0					Numeric
Blackberry	7100v	114.0	56.0	20.0	120.0					Numeric
Blackberry	7130g	115.0	56.0	18.0	120.0	240	260			Numeric
Blackberry	7130v	115.0	56.0	18.0	120.0	240	260			Numeric
Blackberry	7230	113.0	74.0	20.0	136.0	240	160			QWERTY
Blackberry	7290	113.0	74.5	22.0	139.0					QWERTY
Blackberry	8700g	110.0	69.5	19.5	134.0	320	240			QWERTY
Blackberry	8700v	110.0	69.5	19.5	139.8	320	240			QWERTY
Blackberry	8707g	110.0	69.5	19.5	139.8	320	240			QWERTY
Blackberry	8707h	110.0	69.5	19.5	140.0	320	240			QWERTY
Blackberry	8707v	110.0	69.5	19.5	139.8	320	240			QWERTY
Blackberry	8800	114.0	66.0	14.0	134.0	320	240		Yes	QWERTY
Blackberry	8820	114.0	66.0	14.0	134.0	320	240		Yes	QWERTY
Blackberry	8830	114.0	66.0	14.0	134.0	320	240		Yes	QWERTY
Palm	Treo Pro	114.0	60.0	14.0	113.0	320	320	2.0	Yes	QWERTY
Palm	Centro	107.0	53.0	19.0	124.0	320	320	1.3		QWERTY
Palm	Treo 500	110.0	61.0	16.0	120.0	320	240	2.0		QWERTY
Palm	Treo 500v	110.0	61.0	16.0	120.0	320	240	2.0		QWERTY
Palm	Treo 680	113.0	59.0	21.0	158.0	320	320	0.3		QWERTY
Palm	Treo 750	115.0	58.0	22.0	154.0	240	240	1.0		QWERTY