Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Few besides Steve Jobs and his inner circle know. And no, the SDK doesn’t mean the iPhone will be magically unlocked to be used on any GSM phone carrier – that trick will still need to be performed with the assistance of the iPhone hackers, while iPod Touch owners miss out altogether on any kind of voice communications capability – at least until someone releases an iPod Touch microphone which is then hacked to run with an iPhone or iPod Touch version of Skype or other VoIP applications.
While some think the entire apps saga has been a debacle for Apple, the truth is that locking the iPhone down in the beginning was a very clever thing to do. Not only did it spur developers to really think about creating web apps for the iPhone, but it helped Apple to keep working on the iPhone, the iPod Touch and the SDK, without needing to worry about new iPhone viruses or malware popping up and damaging iPhones.
Figuring out how to properly secure a mobile device is a challenge, and while we haven’t seen a mass outbreak of a mobile phone virus that spread across the world like wildfire, there have been virus outbreaks on Symbian devices that have meant the phones needed firmware restoration to be brought back to working condition.
While the iPhone is meant to be built on a much more robust platform, all software and hardware have vulnerabilities that are waiting to be discovered by the hackers and exploited, especially when they are new, making the delayed release of an SDK that much more important as Apple strives to learn from the last few months of hacks, and user feedback from some of the users of the more than 1.3 million iPhones out there – which doesn’t even include iPod Touch sales figures!
So… we can certainly rejoice that the iPhone and iPod Touch are officially transforming themselves into the mini computers they’ve clearly been from day one, with an undoubted flood of third party applications surely on the way not long after the SDK is officially unleashed onto the world sometime in February 2008.
With the SDK due next year, rumours of 3G iPhones later in 2008 and rumours of a new ultrathin MacBook and/or larger screen iPhone to come, 2007 has so far been a fantastic year for Apple and their customers, with 2008 looking great for Apple too.
Let’s just hope that Apple’s hard work in creating an SDK pays off in spades, and has more than enough security to prevent the year 2008 being the year of viruses and malware for Apple’s most advanced handheld mobile computing devices of all – the iPhone and the iPod Touch!
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
LATEST HEADLINES FROM YOUR IT
