Between Brackets

Seems that the only Smart Phone platform that didn’t grow the second half of this year in the states is the WinMo platform. This is according to a survey from ComScore.

The good news is that the smartphone market keeps on growing and that we’ll see more feature rich phones. This will drive the adoption of mobile internet, which we think is a good thing

Here’s a malware removal tool from Nokia for those of you who got hit by the “Curse of Silence” sms.

I can also recommend you to install some sort of virus protection on your smart phones, certainly if you’ve got a data plan or use you WI-FI connection. I have Kaspersky for mobile installed on my devices and often receive a “incoming connection blocked” log in my firewall log. It’s just a matter of time before we’ll see an out-break of some nasty back-door mobile pest.

Adam Gowdiak released information to Nokia and Sun Microsystems with respect to a potentially devastation security leak in the S40 series phones. According to articles on the net (here in dutch and here in english) it would be enough to know the target’s phonenumber to gain access to their virtually any data on the phone (e.g. contact lists).

Most consternation seems to be about the fact that Mr. Adam Gowdiak only gave a summary of his findings to Nokia and is asking about 13000 euros (20.000 dollars) for disclosing the full report.

What’s more worrying to me is that about 100 million devices in the world are now potentially easily hackable. And the question is: how will Nokia make sure (if the vulnerability claims turn out to be real) that every phone gets updated?

This is maybe again a case for having more internet connectivity on mobile phones, because then updates can be more easily distributed on a timely basis. This in the old PC world already proved to be very effective against security vulnerabilities.

A new month has gone and thus a new report had to come: the May report from Admob.

Highlights:

• Western Europe is now included (they finally understood it is slightly bigger than the UK )
• “Spain and Italy are leading broad and rapid traffic growth”: no surprise, these countries have been using cellphones like crazy since their introduction in Europe
• “The iPhone is grabbing market share in Europe”: good for Apple.
• “Symbian dominates Europe”: will Symbian be able to maintain its share (79%!), or will it become the Un*x of cellphones, while Apple becomes the Micros*ft of cellphones?

I guess that the biggest trend is that the Admob monthly traffic keeps growing…

Keep in mind that this report only includes sites that use Admob, and isn’t necessarily representative for the entire market. Maybe iphone friendly sites are more inclined to use Admob than other sites (because the apple has more screen estate for one).

But anyway, the report is interesting material. enjoy!