Today, a decade and a half later, I’ve taken delivery of a Samsung Galaxy S II. If ever you wanted an illustration of the phenomenal pace at which technology advances, here it is. In what seems like an alarmingly short time, we’ve progressed from that rudimentary brick to a slim, slate-style affair with a vibrant full-colour touchscreen, a feature list as long as your arm, 16GB of internal storage and, well, slightly better battery life.

Consider that voice calls are now just a small part of a smartphone’s job and you could question whether the two phones are even really the same sort of device.

The change that’s really struck me, though, is the pricing. Back in 1996 I paid £30 for my old mr20, then signed up to Orange’s popular “Talk 15” plan. At £17.50 a month, this gave me a generous 15 minutes of voice calls a month, after which calls cost 10p a minute to Orange phones and, presumably, more to other sorts of phone. Hey, it was a long time ago.

As I mentioned, I couldn’t send SMS messages from my phone, and as for data services, forget it. This was 1996: most of us didn’t have the internet on our landlines, let alone our mobiles.

Now compare my new O2 contract, which starts today. Once more I’ve paid £30 up-front for the phone, and from here on I’ll be paying £21.50 a month. Accounting for inflation, that makes my new contract about 20% cheaper than my old Talk 15 tariff. Yet for that money I get vastly more than before: 200 minutes of talk time, unlimited text messages and 500MB of internet usage.

To be fair, the contract’s longer (two years, rather than one), but still, this represents an incredible increase in value. It’s easy to grumble about mobile phone providers, and often they deserve it: I’m sure we’ve all had frustrating experiences where providers switch around contracts in unwelcome ways, demand exorbitant fees for bog-standard services, screw up your credit rating or point-blank refuse to help with technical problems.

But when I reflect that, compared to my undergraduate self, I’m getting around 15 times as many minutes for my money – plus text messages – plus internet access – plus a phone that is itself, quite simply, gorgeous – it’s hard to feel too hard done by.

And I have to admit, I get a little excited trying to imagine what sort of phone I could possibly have in 15 years to make the S II look as ridiculously antiquated as the mr20 does now.

What terrible tariffs have you been on in the past? What chunky phones are you now ashamed to admit you once proudly carried around in an unseemly bulging pocket? While my positive mood lasts I’m declaring an amnesty, so share your worst!

Mobile money is the future, or so I’m assured by research into the use of Near Field Communications (NFC) systems, which says most of us will be using our smartphones to pay for stuff within the next four years.

First things first, mobile money is not new. And, no, I’m not talking about the fact that money itself is pretty damn mobile when you think about it — what I’m talking about provides a system whereby you don’t have to carry real cash and can instead just point an easily carried payment device at a retailer.

Most of you will immediately know what I’m talking about when I mention the name of this bit of wonder kit, this device that has revolutionised retail, that does away with the need to carry cash and that just about everyone is comfortable using: it’s called a debit card.

For the small business it’s a no-brainer as the payment mechanisms are already well established and the associated costs already factored into the business plan. There are precious few compatibility problems, everyone knows how to use it and almost everyone has one. Sure, even with chip and pin there remains a fraud risk but, again, that’s a known entity and most businesses will be aware of the procedures required to mitigate the risk and deal with any fraud that should occur. And, my debit card does not need a battery, how about yours?

Debit cards

Which brings us neatly to the problems I have with this concept of the majority of us jumping from cash and cards to smartphone money and NFC systems. Debit cards have been around since the early eighties and, in 2011, banks still issue cheque books. OK, that is about to change over the next year or two as a result of fewer people actually using cheques any more, but it has taken more than 25 years to get to this point.

Debit cards have been around since the early eighties and, in 2011, banks still issue cheque books

If we are to believe the NFC hype then the general public acceptance jump from debit card to smartphone as payment method will take less than five years. That, frankly, is very hard to believe, even for an evangelistic and unashamed geek like me. (Of course, the fact that the research suggesting this was commissioned by Monetise, a “global enabler of mobile money services” does nothing to help me accept the conclusions.)

But let’s take a closer look anyway. I am informed by this research that the number of people in the UK using their mobile phones to manage their money (access bank accounts, make purchases and perhaps pay some bills) has doubled in just two years. Sounds impressive, but it has doubled from 5% to 10%, so hardly anything to get really excited about.

The research insists that the number will go past 50% “in the next few years as banks and retailers take advantage of the widespread adoption of smartphones, apps and 3G phone networks to deliver new services”. OK, given a rather huge dose of benefit of the doubt I will go along with that. Where I think it all goes tits up is when it insists that a major factor will be “the emergence of ‘tap-and-go’ payments using Near Field Communications”.

An emerging trend?

The report, Emerging Trends in Mobile Banking, discovered 57% have used mobile banking more frequently in the past year than they did in the previous year, 68% find banking on the handset easier than over the internet, and 70% are very keen to use their mobile to buy things. Really, very keen? That may change when they get to the shops and discover the mobile phone battery is dead. Or the shop in question doesn’t accept Nokia money, only Motorola money. “You want to pay by iPhone sir? There’s a 1.5% handling fee for that as Apple charge us extra” and so on.

I’m not knocking NFC just for the sake of it; I can see huge potential for the technology. But to suggest that most of us will be flocking to pay for stuff with it in just a handful of years from now is folly of the first order. Until a smartphone is as small as my debit card, has the same battery life and can be pretty much guaranteed to be accepted everywhere I go, I think I will be sticking with my flexible friend…

Much has been written about the security of data in the cloud, and even more about the insecurity of the same. Until now, things have been somewhat quieter when it comes to how we access cloud-based data on the move. That, I suspect, is about to change.

Plenty of effort has been poured into securing online data stores, and plenty is made by the providers of those cloud services in making sure potential customers know about it. Which is why the bad guys are understandably looking for the soft targets, and at the moment that would appear to be Android apps.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: the smaller your business, the bigger the benefits of cloud computing. That rings especially true at the ‘free’ end of the cloud scale where the attraction of services such as those provided by Google can offer real bottom-line savings for hard pressed small business concerns. Security within the free or low-cost cloud isn’t somehow automatically weaker than that found at the expensive end of the cloud provision market either.

You can be sure that Google has invested heavily in securing the data at rest within those cloud bases, incorporating all the multi-layered protocols and synchronous replication processes you might expect. But perhaps it needs to invest more at the other end, the smartphone to be precise. What you need to ask yourself is whether Android could be the weak link in the cloud security chain?

Dan Wallach, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, got the ball rolling when he revealed that his undergraduate security class had decided to listen in on the traffic to and from his Android smartphone, a Motorola Droid X running Android 2.2.1, with his permission of course.

With Android overtaking Apple iOS as the most popular mobile operating system, security of Android apps is going to become something we hear more and more about

The class used Wireshark and Mallory to sniff the data and quickly discovered that Google wasn’t encrypting traffic heading for Google Calendar (using the default Google Calendar app that came with the phone) which is a pretty bad start if you were expecting this kind of information to be kept secure and confidential in transit. Google is, I understand, planning on introducing encrypted traffic to Google Calendar on Android as part of an unspecified maintenance release in the future.

What really grabbed my attention, however, was while the professor had a Facebook account configured to specify fully encrypted traffic, the Android Facebook app ignored that and sent everything in the clear. Especially as Wallach notes “Facebook isn’t doing anything like OAuth signatures, so it may be possible to inject bogus posts as well”. Oh, and one of the requests that the class saw heading to the Facebook server was carrying a SQL statement, which doesn’t bode well.

Identity management specialist Phil Lieberman argues that the sending of data (other than passwords) in the clear is “absolutely typical of open-source software” and insists that there is little or no incentive for the software developer to do otherwise unless the destination system absolutely requires it.

Indeed, he goes further to warn that the Dan Wallach revelation is an “early warning shot” when it comes to the use of cloud-computing platforms and Android. “The stark reality is that computer science graduates rarely, if ever, receive any training on how to write secure applications,” Lieberman claimed. “So it should come as no surprise that many applications created by these same people are insecure”.

Certainly, with Android overtaking Apple iOS as the most popular mobile operating system, security of Android apps is going to become something we hear more and more about. Unlike Apple, which has had relatively little problem with malicious apps finding their way onto iPhones, courtesy of what some argue are Draconian controls over what reaches the App Store, the Android Market accepts anything that is uploaded and there are no such pre-publication clearance controls to filter out the insecure and downright dangerous.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that just last week we have seen the discovery of some 50 or so Android apps infected with the ‘DroidDream’ rootkit, which are capable of intercepting and diverting personal data. Of course, Google acts quickly (within minutes in this case) to remove such software as soon as it can when such a discovery is made, but that didn’t prevent people downloading them and being infected in the first place. The DroidDream rootkit also has the capability to download other malicious software which it can then install, so nobody really knows how many handsets are already infect or what they are infected with.

More alarmingly, those same infected handsets, or even the same apps, could be used to access business data in the cloud. Whereas much focus has been put on ensuring company data is properly encrypted when stored on mobile devices, that focus has to now widen to include the apps being used to access the data in the first place.

At the very least, security policy needs to encompass the usage of authorised apps only on any device used to access business data. Better still, ensure that processes are in place that control what data and services a mobile device can, and cannot, access. Either that, or as Phil Lieberman starkly says “use your smartphone to log into cloud and secure systems at your peril”.

Step forward David Bayon and Darien Graham-Smith, who claimed that T-Mobile’s decision (now partially reversed) to cut “fair use” data caps to 500MB was essentially “fair” – it was just the way T-Mobile presented it that was the problem.

Sorry chaps, but you’re wrong. Hideously, grossly, sleep-with-your-wife’s-mother-behind-her-back wrong.

T-Mobile’s argument – partially supported by the PC Pro Two, as they shall henceforth be known – is that anything more bandwidth-chomping than basic browsing should be performed on a Wi-Fi connection.

Let me remind all concerned that these are mobile phones – the word makes up 75% of T-Mobile’s name for God’s sake. If I only wanted to watch video, use Spotify, download a podcast or upload photos when I was within spitting distance of a Wi-Fi network, I wouldn’t bother with a sodding smartphone. I’d use my laptop – it’s far better for all those jobs.

I paid a couple of hundred quid for an iPhone and thirty-odd quid a month to my network precisely to enjoy the multimedia benefits the smartphone brings. If all I wanted was to make calls, read email, and browser the occasional webpage, I could do it on a Nokia No-Name 8700 on a £10 a month tariff.

The mobile networks have sold us these all-singing, all-dancing smartphones, weaned us on to expensive all-inclusive monthly tariffs, and now want to take away the free drinks. And not even in an up-front way, but in a sneaky change the Ts&Cs and hope they don’t notice way.

Perhaps if T-Mobile et al spent a little less on ridiculous, celebrity-filled TV adverts telling us “life is for sharing” and invested more money in a network that was actually fit for sharing, it wouldn’t have to trim its “fair-use” policy in the first place.

While Posterous has a fully functional mobile site, we’re surprised that it’s taken this long for an Android app to appear, especially since the iPhone version was launched in August 2009.

We’re pleased it has, though, because the new app makes using this simple service even more convenient. Open the app and click the button marked Post and you’re presented with a simple blogging interface, with title and body copy boxes alongside a couple of option buttons: the former allows you to add tags and location information, and the latter facilitates photo or video attachments.

The app lets you post to several different sites – handy if you’ve got one to post news about your favourite sports team, for instance, and another for personal links and musings – and a range of settings means you can choose different levels of picture and video quality to conserve bandwidth.

Posterous’ new app automatically presents sites optimised for mobile browsing if they’re available, and works well in landscape mode too, but we can’t help but feel that some features are missing. There’s no way to customise your profile and autopost settings – which permits Posterous to post links to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more than a dozen other social networking sites simultaneously – are missing, too.

Still, these are all concerns that Posterous is aware of, and the firm’s promising to improve on this first version of its app with the full range of desktop settings, alongside support for notifications, a broader range of file types and full commenting.

It’s very much a work in progress, then, but the arrival of this minimal blogging service on Android is an exciting development worthy of our Android App of the Week – after all, few other apps allow you to publish pictures, videos, text entries and more so quickly and across so many sites and networks.

Want more great Android apps? Check out our previous Android Apps of the Week or read our 36 Best Android Apps feature

Android is on a wave, it would seem, what with Gartner just announcing that the Google mobile OS has a 25.5% global market share. This puts it in second place behind Symbian on 36.6%, miles ahead of Apple’s iOS on 16.7% and RIM on 14.8%. Indeed, Gartner says that 1.4 million more Android handsets were sold in the third quarter compared to this time last year, taking the total to 20.5 million. However, one piece of polling would suggest that not everyone in the Android camp is a happy bunny.

A survey conducted by a mobile phone comparison website called MyPhoneDeals reckons that many Android owners would much rather have an iPhone, truth be told. Interestingly, the reverse is not true. MyPhoneDeals found Android owners some four times more likely to covet an iPhone than iPhone owners were to desire an Android handset. Apparently a third of the Android-owning folk asked said they wanted an iPhone, and 7% of iPhone owners actually said they would prefer an Android model thank you very much.

The figures coming out of this poll (which doesn’t appear to be available online, sorry folks) rather surprisingly also suggest that only16% of people would ‘most like to own’ an Android smartphone. Which is downright bizarre, if you ask me, given that popularity wave of which I spoke at the start of this piece and the sales figures for Android devices so far this year. More of my ideas on that later. Still, it could be worse, we could be talking about the new Windows Phone devices of which only 3% of respondents stuck up their hands regarding the most wanted question.

Apple will be happy enough, though, as MyPhoneDeals found that more than half of men who didn’t already own a smartphone would choose to break their smartphone virginity with an iPhone. That compares to less than one-fifth who were planning an Android first purchase. Woman proved to be even more attracted to the iPhone with nearly three-quarters of those asked thinking it the most desirable of smartphones.

There are, I think, a few things wrong with all of this. First there is the sample size involved which, at just 524 people, is hardly likely to be hugely representative of the market in my opinion. Secondly, I can’t help but feel that what this survey reveals is that Apple brand marketing works really well. Everyone knows not only what an iPhone is and what it does but what it looks like. The whole iOS interface has become an iconic benchmark for user friendliness and is what most consumers aspire to and most rivals, it has to be said, attempt to copy.

That doesn’t mean that people really don’t want an Android, but rather that they are less aware that the smartphone they lust after is Android-based perhaps? My own totally random polling of friends and family, which involved me showing people an HTC Desire handset and asking if they would rather have this smartphone, an iPhone or an Android handset produced interesting results.

I asked 10 people. Three knew the HTC Desire was an Android handset, four said they would like an iPhone, two said an Android and one said the HTC. What does this prove? Simple: many people wouldn’t know an Android-based smartphone if it bit them on the arse, whereas an iPhone doesn’t need to gnash on your booty to introduce itself.

Of course, this Android commoditisation of the smartphone market is a double-edged sword: it builds market share but with a myriad custom front ends it does nothing to build consumer awareness or, importantly, brand loyalty or desirability. Still, even allowing for the small sample size of that survey, it remains interesting that so many people with other phones would prefer an iPhone, and one has to wonder why it is they don’t have one.

The only thing I can think of that would deter folk is price. If that is the case, as Android brand awareness increases and Android-based handsets continue to innovate and impress, the iPhone could be in for a bumpy ride in the marketplace.

Where Windows Phone 7 handsets fit into all of this is less easy to predict, what do you reckon?

Fanboys had better sit down before continuing, as I have some bad news for you, unless your particular tech obsession of choice is CrackBerry or Windows flavoured. Neither Apple iOS nor Android will beat BlackBerry or Microsoft as a mobile business platform any time soon, according to the latest market research.

But more of that later, first let’s start with some confusing jargon. A newly published study conducted by Plantronics reinforces what I already know, namely that more and more people are working outside of the traditional office environment these days.

Well, actually, that’s being a little disingenuous as in reality it confused me greatly by suggesting that people increasingly work in ‘transitional spaces’ and, to be honest, I had no idea what that really meant.  Delving a little deeper, it would appear that it means ‘public spaces used while in transit’ according to Plantronics. Translated into normal-speak I think what the survey was actually trying to say is that people are doing more work while on the bus, train or plane. And in hotel rooms, airport lounges or coffee shops for that matter. Anywhere outside of the office, other than the home environment in other words.

This should come as no great surprise, given that the likes of IDC were predicting only last year that one third of the world’s workforce (about 1.2 billion people if you prefer) would be mobile by 2013. But I was still somewhat taken aback by the Plantronics numbers, which suggested that a majority (55.2%) spend some 20 percent of their working week doing their work in these transitional spaces.

Of course, this particular survey, coming as it did from a manufacturer of audio headsets, was geared towards convincing me that the most important factor to emerge from this change in working patterns is noise. Specifically background noise that impacts upon concentration, productivity and business success as a result of the distraction. I mean, how dare people talk in a coffee shop when I’m trying to work, have they no consideration? Actually, most of the office workers I speak to reckon that it’s quieter in a coffee shop anyway, so I’m not sure what all the fuss is about.

Leaving the noise issue behind, and concentrating more on the inevitable march towards mobility in the workforce, another IDC survey caught my eye, this one being the catchily entitled ‘2010 EMEA Enterprise Mobility Survey’ which questioned 1,240 end users in 13 countries about the latest workforce mobility trends within their companies.

Two things jumped out at me from this survey:

1. Consumerisation of IT is not an issue, and the so-called trend of ‘bring your own smartphone into work’ just doesn’t ring true to the majority of people. Indeed, IDC reckons the response was almost unanimous in predicting an increase in company-paid mobility, as it calls it. Or ‘I should bloody well think so’ hardware provision as I call it. The type of hardware was the really interesting bit, as respondents to the survey predict a “heterogeneous world in terms of business devices” with smartphones seeing the largest growth at the expense of laptops. Tablets and netbooks figure to a lesser extent, but will still outnumber laptops in the office of the future it would seem. I can’t say I’m totally convinced, despite being a fan of netbooks and smartphones. Sure I carry my iPhone everywhere, but I try not to write long reports using it. My netbook is another matter, but I’m not perhaps your typical small business user and my needs are fairly low-resource shall we say. I’m happy knocking out a few thousand words or doing some online research on the netbook, but it’s not a true mobile office in the way that your average laptop can be said to be. As for tablets, well let’s not even go there as I’m still recovering from the last time I dared suggest an iPad wasn’t the ideal business tool. And talking of getting into trouble with the Apple fans…

2. When it comes to smartphones for business, Apple has a long way to go. The IDC survey suggests that BlackBerry is the preferred smartphone platform of choice amongst ‘business decision makers’ with Microsoft in second place ahead of Symbian. Apple iOS was fourth and Android fifth. What’s more, IDC doesn’t see any great change at the very top with BlackBerry predicted to still be number one in three years time. The only real change will be the decline of Symbian, as Apple iOS and Android eat into business market share.

So do you run a business and use iOS or Android over BlackBerry or Windows? If so, please let us know why. If you don’t we’d still like to hear from you, just tell us why not.

October has been a month of ‘Fanboy FAIL’ as far as sensible smartphone market analysis is concerned. First there was Steve Jobs bigging up iOS, iPhones and the iPad while dissing Android and RIM. Then there was the inevitable fanboy fracas from all sides that followed, including Jim Balsillie throwing some RIM soundbytes into the mix. This has truly been the month that common sense was finally shot in the head.

If you need further proof of this, then take a look at the Good Technology Device Activation Report for the 3rd quarter of 2010. At first glance, this report would appear to suggest that both Apple iOS and Google Android platforms are being rapidly adopted within the enterprise sector, while BlackBerry has vanished from the business market altogether.

The report reveals that the iPhone 4 was the single most activated mobile device within the enterprise during the 3rd quarter. The seemingly good news for Apple does not finish there, as the iPhone 3GS took the number two spot and iPad was number three. The Motorola Droid X came in at number four for Android and HTC Cedar held up Windows Mobile at number five. Apple iOS devices accounted for more than 50 percent of all new activations from June through September, Android 30 percent and Windows Mobile 15 percent.

Have you spotted the fly in the Good Technology report ointment yet? Yep, that’s it: the complete lack of any BlackBerry share. Surely some mistake, eh guv’nor? I visit a lot of enterprises, and I travel by air and rail a lot as well, and I’ve not noticed any dramatic drop in the numbers of BlackBerry toting suits.

Does the report reflect a trend I have missed? Does it mean that BlackBerrys are rapidly falling out of favour within and without the enterprise? Erm, that would be a massive no, actually. It reflects the fact that Good Technology, which admits as much in the report itself, has no insight into BlackBerry device activations at all as RIM devices all use the BlackBerry Enterprise Server for corporate email access.

Does the report reflect a trend I have missed? Does it mean that BlackBerrys are rapidly falling out of favour within and without the enterprise?

It is, at the end of the day, about as valuable an insight into the true positioning on mobile device platforms within the enterprise as Steve Jobs rubbishing Android and RIM in his hugely misplaced rant during the Apple earnings call.

It is, when all is said and done, about as insightful as Research In Motion’s head honcho Jim Balsillie claiming that “for those of us who live outside of Apple’s distortion field, we know that seven-inch tablets will actually be a big portion of the market” when the truth is that’s just wishful thinking right now.

The bottom line, once you strip out all of the fanboy posturing, CEO positioning and incomplete device activation reporting, is simply this: smartphones and tablets are good for business.

Period.

Now that that’s settled can we please get back to the real world stuff which should be concerning us all, such as how to best secure the use of generation next mobile computing data within the enterprise? I’d much rather see everyone getting hot under the collar about that particular hot potato than continue with this whole, pointless and puerile “my phone is better than your phone” nonsense.

Yesterday Adobe made the beta of its new Flash 10.1 player available for desktop testing via Adobe Labs. The fact that it’s only a point release suggests that it’s a relatively trivial update but that’s not the case. In fact 10.1 is one of the most significant releases in the history of Flash.

What makes Flash 10.1 so important is its new dedicated support for mobile playback. Take a look at the list of new features in 10.1 – improvements in memory utilization and management, start-up time, CPU usage and rendering along with support for multi-touch, accelerometers, automatic pause, sleep mode, adaptive frame rate and hardware video acceleration – and you’ll see that it’s a major rewrite designed with one aim in mind: extending full Flash usage from the desktop to the device.

With the phone market dwarfing that of desktop computers, Flash 10.1 is key to Adobe’s plans to “Enable consumers to engage with rich Internet experiences seamlessly across any device, anywhere” – the mission statement of the Adobe-led Open Screen Project (OSP).

What makes Adobe likely to succeed in this aim is less the list of new features than the list of partners that have signed up to the OSP and to supporting 10.1: Palm, Motorola, Intel, ARM, Sony Ericsson, NVIDIA, Samsung, HTC, Nokia and, since October, RIM and Google. Microsoft is not on the list, unsurprisingly considering its similar ambitions for Silverlight, but Windows Mobile 6.5 support is built in.

It all sounds so simple: just produce web-optimised content in the same old way but now it will automatically work as well on a handheld device as it does on the desktop. No more Flash Lite. No more Device Central. Everything just working seamlessly across any device, anywhere…

…That’s the dream, but let’s get real.

To begin with, Adobe clearly still has to cater for older and less powerful devices that aren’t up to supporting 10.1 so Flash Lite is not ready for the scrapheap quite yet. In fact it was revealed recently that the player is set to be updated in 2010 with Flash Lite 4.0 providing ActionScript 3.0 support and browser-based playback .

Which raises the whole question of standalone applications for mobiles. As both Flash 10.1 and Flash Lite 4.0 are designed for browsing (as Mark Doherty from Adobe recently confirmed) then the future for standalone applications clearly lies with AIR.

On this front, yesterday Adobe also announced the launch of the AIR 2.0 beta which raises further questions regarding compatibility and device support – especially as one of its new features is the ability to extend the cross-platform AIR runtime with native code. However, there’s no mention of smartphones.

As the Open Screen Project home page makes clear though, AIR support is very much part of Adobe’s plans for the future. And certain hints on the Adobe AIR team blog, for example, suggest that AIR support for smartphones (or at least Android) is well advanced.

Then there’s Apple. After Microsoft, the most obvious name missing from Adobe’s list of OSP partners is arguably the most important of all. And, unlike Microsoft, Apple simply refuses to let Flash anywhere near the iPhone under the terms of its SDK.

However Adobe is not going to let a little thing like that stop it. As it announced at AdobeMAX, Adobe’s  solution is to enable ActionScript 3-based Flash CS5 projects to be recompiled and targeted natively at the iPhone. This went down a treat with the audience, but it will inevitably add a whole new raft of compatibility issues and another layer of complexity.

My original feeling on this was: why not keep things simple and just wait for performance to improve and for Apple to cave in? On reflection though I think that this compiling to native code is a natural extension of the Flash/AIR line-up allowing cross-platform cores to be fine-tuned to individual platforms.

Finally there’s the whole question of how best to target the mobile device. Nowadays most serious Flash developers are using Flex, so particularly relevant here is the announcement on Adobe Labs of “Slider” a mobile-optimized version of the Flex framework.  To an extent Slider sounds like Flex Lite, a streamlined subset of functionality designed to boost performance on less powerful systems. However with a whole new raft of dedicated features for managing screens, resolution-independent sizing and mobile form factors and input methods it’s going to add as much functionality as it cuts. And, with it, add new complexity.

The benefits of mobile playback are  enormous and the launch of Flash Player 10.1 is unreservedly welcome. However it’s also clear that the dream of simple cross-device playback is for the consumer, not for the producer. Device Central is not going to disappear; it’s going to become more central. And so is Flex/Flash Builder/Slider and the all-new Flash Catalyst.

Transitioning to the new world of cross-device development is certainly not going to be as trivial as that point release implies.

Orange’s big unveiling of its iPhone tariffs has caused a bit of a kerfuffle, not least because its prices are almost identical to those of O2. A lot of people are up in arms about the promise of “unlimited browsing”, which in fact comes with a fair-use limit of 750MB.

But, ignoring the terrible decision to put an “unlimited” label on a very clearly capped tariff, is that amount of monthly data actually “fair-use”?

As discussed in this week’s podcast, there’s a very easy way for existing iPhone owners to find out if that data cap would prove troublesome. Just go to Settings -> General -> Usage, and take a look at your Cellular Network Data. I did just that, believing this cap would be encroaching at least a little on my roaming lifestyle, but I was in for a surprise.

Having never reset it manually, that’s my total cellular data usage since I bought my iPhone 13 months ago. Yes, 789MB in 13 months – or around 60MB a month. The internal counter may not be entirely accurate – as many will be quick to point out – but a quick check on the last six months of my itemised O2 bills backs it up. I simply don’t use anything like the data I imagined.

True, it doesn’t include data downloaded via Wi-Fi – which discounts much of my usage at home and at work – but that’s surely not unusual. When I’m out and about on the 3G network I download apps, I browse the internet on my commute, I check the football scores in the pub, I read and send emails and spend too much time on Facebook and Twitter. I’d guess a typical day with my iPhone isn’t at all dissimilar from the vast majority of consumers.

Even if I used my iPhone for business, it’s hard to envisage a realistic scenario in which I’d download more than 12 times the amount of data I already do – with the speed of 3G I doubt I’d even have the patience. The only thing I can think of that may contribute heavily is streaming media, but there are very few apps of that kind that don’t specify Wi-Fi as a must.

Sure, there’ll always be the odd power user who blitzes any cap, which the networks will point out is the entire reason for the majority of us being covered by the fair use policy. But in this case the fair-use cap size does at least appear to be pretty fair.

If only Orange hadn’t tried to hide it behind that word…

UPDATE: To put my casual-user figures in perspective, here is the data usage (in KB per month) for an iPhone power-user working for our sister title MacUser. As you can see, even someone pushing the iPhone 3G, and then 3GS, to the limits – with apps and media featuring prominently – has only once come within 100MB of hitting that 750MB cap, although his monthly average is rising.