Nokia, Apple, Google is the ball starting to roll ?

There is an overall perception that 2008 is the year where mobile will take off as a platform widely open to innovation. Until now, the majority of those exposed to mobile application development have been stuck at the entry of so called operators walled garden, and/or are busy fixing fragmentation problems accross a wide variety of not so similar handset … Recent initiatives from Apple and Google (both newcomers in the mobile arena) suggest that what until recently was looking a distant future is about to happen. There will probably be resistances on the way towards “new mobile” (you may call it mobile 2.0), and to understand what may go wrong it helps to review what the much needed reorganization imply.

Mobile Android, it’s the applications stupid …

It is too early to be sure that Google and its followers of the open handset alliance will really deliver every promises that the mobile Android platform imply , however it looks to us that this project take a refreshing approach on what a mobile platform shall deliver.

The emergence of Android could be much more disruptive than say the release of the Iphone, as it can reach everybody phone …

The mobile phone as a token container, can we trust storage ?

One question KerPass often receive relates to how safe is using a phone to store software token ? A mobile token like the one part of the KerPass UST system, requires storing several cryptographic keys. Security specialists generally consider that software token are not reliable because nearby malicious software can read and duplicate the private information it contains. Common sense certainly suggests that a secure storage system (eg smart card) is a better location to store private keys than say disk storage. That said the complete analogy that most are making in between the modern open and insecure pc and the mobile phone is not accurate. They are reasons beyond “It is nice to have that there…” that make the mobile phone well suited to be a token container.