iPhone Goes Enterprise, Treos and BlackBerrys Go Away?

Come this June, in enterprises across the country, I expect that Treos will begin to wither in the eyes of one-time loyalists, and that erstwhile thumb-keyboard addicts will start to judge their BlackBerrys to be significantly sourer. That's because June is the month in which Apple has promised to ship an enterprise and third-party application embracing the 2.0 version of the firmware that drives its popular but so-far solidly consumer-focused iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

Apple's iPhone will be far from the first mobile device to offer the enterprise connectivity and management features that Steve Jobs announced today. However, from a hardware perspective, the iPhone and the iPod Touch are, by far, the most impressive mobile devices I've ever laid hands on...

Can Nokia Become the Great Light Hope?

Wireless handset and infrastructure giant Nokia has announced plans to acquire Trolltech, a purveyor of application frameworks for desktops and mobile devices.

Armed with its new Trolltech assets, Nokia might find itself in the perfect position to deliver us the sort of next-generation computing devices we need to bid adieu to today's bloated client paradigm.

Macbook Air: Weighing the Pros and Cons

Apple's subnotebook wunder-machine is nigh. I've been waiting for an ultralight Web and writing machine for a long time now. So, should I run out and pant outside my local Apple store until the first units arrive?

Based on the information available right now, let's weigh the pros and cons...

Root My iPhone

I received an iPod Touch for Christmas, and before I loaded it up any MP3s or set a single Safari bookmark, I "jailbroke" the device, thereby opening it to all sorts of handy community-supplied applications, including, as Ryan Naraine is reporting today, potentially malicious code:

Security Watch - Apple - Malicious iPhone (Prank) Trojan is Eye-Opener According to warnings from two different anti-virus vendors, a malicious iPhone software package circulating on the Web could cause legitimate third-party applications to be nuked if the Trojan is uninstalled from iPhones.

Even though the trojan that Ryan wrote about wasn't all that malicious--an application that messes with its neighbors upon uninstall sounds more like shoddy packaging than naughty pranksterism--the fact is that a jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch is a malware outbreak waiting to happen.

The screenshot to the right says it all: When you're running anything on an iPhone, you've doing it as the superuser. I imagine that when Apple decides officially to open their superfly devices to third party applications, they'll rectify the run-as-root situation, since full-sized OS X handles this pretty well.

In addition, I'd like to see the software development community members whose apps populate the Linux-like Installer.app repositories on my iPod Touch implement a code signing framework like the ones that Ubuntu, Red Hat and others provide. You may not be able to tell for sure if the app you're installing will do what it's supposed to do, but at least you can feel confident about where it came from.

eWEEK Labs' mobile and wireless expert, Andrew Garcia, was too sensible to leave his iPhone jailbroken, but I plan to keep my iPod Touch hacked. Without third party apps, the Touch is a slick MP3 player with a Web browser, but with the app doors open, it's the best handheld computer I've ever used.

You Say You Want a Revolution?

Eyeing the trends around user-friendly Linux desktops, sub-$500 notebooks, universal broadband, and Web 2.0 office applications, my colleague Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols opines that we're on the brink of a low-end Linux revolution.

For my part, I'm not so sure.

Without question, Linux has matured into a effective, manageable, and low-cost solution for companies' and individuals' computing needs--I've been getting my work and play accomplished quite nicely since just after Windows XP went gold, in 2001.

However, I'm severely underwhelmed by most of the low-cost notebook machines that Steven cites in his column. The Asus eeePC, for instance, sports a paltry 800x480 pixel display at a time when dread horizontal-scrolling is becoming the norm on even 1024x768 displays.

What's more, universal broadband isn't seeming so universal to me, and I live and work in the ultra-connected city of San Francisco. As long as our government opts to parcel out spectrum for wireless data exclusively to cell phone carriers, I don't see this situation improving significantly enough to allow us to relocate our computing to the clouds.

Finally, while I'm an enthusiastic user of Web 2.0 applications such as those that Google offers, until Google and others nail the problem of offline access, most of us will have to stick to fat clients with plenty of storage.

Don't get me wrong, I want to see a revolution in mobile computing and connectivity as much as anyone else, and I believe that Linux, as an open and vibrant software platform, can play a significant role in such as transformation.

However, software is only one part of the equation, and we simply will not see the sort of thin, light, and well-connected hardware required to deliver us into this flexible computing future as long as we lack mobile Internet connectivity service providers that are satisfied to shelve their walled garden aspirations, get out of the way, and give us simple IP dial tone we need bring this future online.