Mobility and Wireless: Features

If you're an Apple iPhone user and security's not on your mind, you're at risk; at risk of having a Web mail account hacked; at risk of having your online identity stolen; and at risk of losing valuable personal information, such as wireless service account data, that could result in financial losses, among other disasters.

WiMAX has always been something of an oddball technology in the mobile data world.

Nifty designs, snazzy interfaces, and music and video galore: We give you the skinny on a dozen trend-setting mobile phone models that are slated to debut soon.

In Part 1 of this series, I looked at the mechanisms available to IT staffers to activate, deploy and configure iPhones in business environments. But the biggest new business-oriented feature available on the iPhone, thanks to the iPhone 2.x firmware (included with the iPhone 3G and available for free to users of first-generation iPhones or for US$9.95 for iPod Touch users), is the addition of ActiveSync for accessing Microsoft Exchange.

Trying to secure laptops, cell phones, PDAs, and other mobile devices today is "terrifying," says Christopher Paidhrin, IT security and HIPAA compliance officer at Southwest Washington Medical Center. "End-point security is scarily immature."

You could think of this as the Tarzan protocol for Wi-Fi. The goal is to improve interactive Wi-Fi connections dramatically for moving vehicles.

Philippe Hanset is wondering about the intersection of the Slingbox and the campuswide wireless LAN at University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he's senior networking engineer.

Internet shines in Beijing

For the IT worker, the phrase "desktop mobility" has many meanings. It can mean having a laptop computer. It can mean keeping all your data in the cloud so that you can access it at any time and from anywhere. It can even mean downsizing your work environment to fit on a PDA or a smartphone.

For some users, the new generation of ultraportable notebooks comes close to embodying the Holy Grail for road warriors. Their laptop-like keyboards make them more usable for typing tasks than smart phones, but they are lighter and cheaper than traditional laptops. The original Asus Eee PC, for instance, cost about US$400 and weighed about two pounds when it was introduced last October.

One thing you can depend on these days is that the claims made for wireless routers, like 300Mbit/sec. throughput and 1,000-foot range, are nothing more than digital pipe dreams. The plain and simple truth is that these speeds and distances just aren't going to happen in your home, office or any place on this planet.