Android Security Vulnerability

Sunday, October 26, 2008, Posted by Mobile Concerns, No Comment

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.

HTC Forecast 600,000 G1 Sales

Saturday, October 25, 2008, Posted by Mobile Concerns, No Comment

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.

iPhone now no. 3 by revenue

Thursday, October 23, 2008, Posted by Mobile Concerns, No Comment

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.

.Net Compact Applications on Symbian

Monday, October 20, 2008, Posted by Mobile Concerns, No Comment

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.

Malicious Smartphone Code

Wednesday, October 15, 2008, Posted by Mobile Concerns, No Comment

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.

Blackberry Bold & Mobile Software Reliability

Monday, October 13, 2008, Posted by Mobile Concerns, No Comment

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.

    • Search interest in Mobile Development Platforms

    Wednesday, October 08, 2008, Posted by Mobile Concerns, No Comment

    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.

    Device Specifications

    Wednesday, October 01, 2008, Posted by Mobile Concerns, No Comment

    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