Ever since Gizmodo broke the news about that iPhone 4G that was left in a bar, it seems everyone wants to know more about the next generation Jesus Phone from Apple. But at what price?

How does free grab you? Well that’s the promise that’s been spotted by security experts Sophos appearing in both Twitter and email-based spam scams. An email is doing the rounds which offers the (un)lucky recipients the opportunity to test and ultimately keep an iPhone 4G. This despite the fact that it has yet to be released, and Apple has yet to officially say anything about it other than ‘give us our prototype back’ either. The scam, of course, being that anyone wanting to sign up for the free testing deal has to hand over personal information in order to do so and the spam is really just a clever phishing exercise.

The Twitter scam is equally sinister, using the accounts of apparently sexy young women to offer free iPhone 4G handsets for users who click on a promotional link. A link that, of course, takes them to a personal data harvesting website.

As Graham Cluley of Sophos says “some internet users might blindly hand over their personal information in the belief that they will get a preview version of what will be one of 2010’s hottest gadgets”. I’d take issue with that statement, in that there is no ‘might’ about it and some users will, for sure, do just that. Be it as a result of living in a freebie society where people happily expect to get something for nothing, or maybe it’s the effect of junk food on the brain, but there are certainly plenty of people who will fall for this scam.

While I don’t imagine for a minute that the average IT Pro reader falls into this bracket, it might be worth letting your friends and family know that the price of an iPhone 4G right now is just too high to be worth risking that mouse click upon.

So iPad pricing for the UK has been announced ahead of pre-orders being taken for the 28th May sale day, and somewhat predictably cries of ‘rip off Britain’ have rung out from much of the technology media. But are the prices really that out of step with the USA?

Well, let’s have a look at the facts rather than simply jerking of the knee. Here’s what an Apple iPad will cost in the UK:

The entry level WiFi only version is £429 for the 16GB version, £499 for the 32GB device and £599 for a 64GB iPad. Move to the other end of the scale with devices that add 3G to the mix and you are looking at £529 for the 16GB iPad, £599 for 32GB, and £699 for the range topping 64GB model.

All of those prices include VAT, and for me that’s the important part. So while a basic entry level iPad will cost you around £340 ($499) by the time you add VAT it starts to level out a bit at £399. On top of that you have to then factor in the cost of UK trading which, my international retail pals assure me accepted as being in the region of 7 percent. That brings the price up to £427 which is just a couple of quid difference, hardly a right royal rip off if you ask me.

Too many folk appear to have completely missed the ‘including VAT’ element of the pricing announcement, not to mention that US pricing does not include local sales taxes which have to be added, and instead have jumped to the usual conclusion that Apple is just ripping us off on this side of the pond, which is a shame.

So, am I going to be buying one? No.

Is the price putting me off? Yes.

But that’s just because I can’t justify spending £700, plus another data plan, for a bigger version of the iPhone that I’m already quite happy with. OK, I appreciate that the iPad is actually a lot more than that, but you can see where I am coming from. When my iPhone data plan contract has expired, and Apple has released the second generation iPad devices with the bugs ironed out and additional functionality built in, I’ll be in the queue with my wallet open faster than an MP filling in an expenses claim.

There’s a joke going around technology media circles at the moment: a Microsoft employee dropped a Kin prototype phone in a Californian bar, nobody noticed. It has a certain resonance, not least because Microsoft would quite likely happily kill for the sort of publicity being generated for Apple by the iPhone 4G dropped in a bar story currently on every newswire but which started over at Gizmodo.

While Apple has now apparently asked tech site Gizmodo, which supposedly purchased the prototype iPhone 4G from an individual who ‘found’ it in a bar, to give it’s phone back. Of course, Gizmodo is likely to be more than happy to oblige no matter how much it paid for the phone. Even if it paid $10,000 which is at the upper end of the guessing game scale (most sources suggest $5000 is nearer the mark) the site will have seen a huge return on investment in terms of the on-site advertising revenue on those pages breaking the news but also the longer term impact of the reputational kudos. The only spoiler has been some lingering doubt, much of it spread by other sites which one has to assume are jealous at not getting the thing themselves, over the provenance on the device. Some are claiming it is just another fake, one more hoax in the long history of iPhone development misdirection. If Apple want it back, and according to Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell it most certainly does, then it must be the real thing, no?

Meanwhile, Microsoft can only dream of the kind of media hysteria that has been unleashed over the last week as a result of that dropped prototype. The best it has managed so far, in relation to the badly named Kin phone (as in who would want that Kin Microsoft phone, speak it out loud for the full effect) has been some rather lame controversy concerning a promotional video showing some bloke taking photos of his man-boobs to share with the world. It encourages sexting, cry the usual suspects, and if it were a woman doing the up-blouse videoing then everyone would be up in arms about it. Of course, it wasn’t a woman, so nobody really cares that much. A bit like the Kin itself. No joke.

You might think that, given the sheer number of business applications available for the iPhone, the answer is a resounding yes. However, it does rather depend, of course on how you approach the question in the first place. If you enter the question arena from the door marked security then things take on an altogether different light. I have lost count of the number of security consultants who have been warning that one of the biggest dangers facing the average enterprise in terms of data loss and security impact potential is that posed by the rise of the smartphone.

Take the recent survey conducted by endpoint data leak prevention outfit DeviceLock, which took over seven months to compile. It asked whether more than a 1000 businesses had taken any steps to secure themselves against the security threat of iPhone usage. Less than 40 percent could confirm that they had, with an alarming number of people admitting that any iPhone threat is treated most definitely as a back burner security issue right now. In Western Europe and North America things were even worse, with 75 percent currently ignoring the iPhone security threat. Compare and contrast with Eastern Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific businesses where close to 60 percent had taken action already.

“While this website-administered poll has inherent limitations, the results do suggest that the iPhone threat to data security is being generally underestimated” said Ashot Oganesyan, DeviceLock CTO and Founder, who concludes “the variation in how the well-developed IT markets of the West view the iPhone threat versus the emerging IT markets of the East may be because Enterprise IT planners in the West are relying on the already-entrenched vendors, such as RIM and Microsoft, to ‘have their backs’ and not introduce such a device without the necessary security hooks in place for device-related policy enforcement and encryption”.

Whatever, history shows us that the most effective enterprise strategy for dealing with any mobile media is simply to establish clear policies with regard to these new devices and enforce those policies using whatever tools are available to them. It ain’t rocket science, but without it I fear that the continuing use of iPhones (and other smartphone devices) within the enterprise could quickly see iPhone security become a stellar security problem.

Rather surprisingly, tomorrow is World Toilet Day. Once you’ve stopped sniggering there is a serious reason behind this: 40% of the world’s population have nowhere safe to go the loo, and 4000 children die every year as a result. But how the heck can an iPhone app help?

I wondered the same thing, to be honest, but as I needed to pee and could possibly save some kids from an unpleasant sounding death at the same time I gave it a go. The free to use app in question, Toilet Finder UK, uses the GPS functionality built into the iPhone 3GS to hook into a database of public toilets and direct you to the nearest one. Which is handy, assuming that you are in an area where there are lots of public toilets on that database that is. Users can add toilet locations by reporting missing ones as they find them (which takes some dedication to the cause) but outside of large cities they proved few and very far between.

That’s the trouble with user generated content driven apps, they need to reach a certain critical mass of users before they become really useful and if they are not really useful from the get go they never reach a critical mass of users. To add to the problems I had, my iPhone insisted I was many miles from my actual location. OK, it was kicking up a storm at the time and the sky was black, but when you are busting for a pee and it is pouring with rain, well that’s just about the time when you need an app like this to work. The combination of my iPhone thinking I was more than 10 miles from my actual location, and Toilet Finder thinking the nearest available loo was another couple of miles away from there, I gave up and had a pee against a tree which didn’t seem to mind. Thankfully the rural B-road I was on didn’t see much traffic, so nobody saw me!

I know, you are still wondering how this can possibly save the life of some toilet-deprived kid on the other side of the planet aren’t you? The clue can be found by the fact that the developer of the Toliet Finder app is the WaterAid charity which is on a mission to “transform lives by improving access to safe water, hygiene and sanitation in the world’s poorest communities”. So when you fire the app up you get a nag screen that offers to take you to the WaterAid website instead of finding you a toilet. Depending upon your level of desperation you might take the website option where you can discover more about the global sanitation crisis.

“For us, trying to find a loo is an inconvenience, but for someone living in the developing world, not having a toilet can be a matter of life or death. We hope that by using the ToiletFinder UK App the British public will think about how lucky they are to have a loo” says WaterAid’s Amy Faulkner.

I wish them luck with this as it is for a good cause. In the meantime I have invested in an empty plastic pop bottle in the boot of the car, and I don’t need an app to find that!

It was inevitable that the iPhone would eventually fall victim to the bad guys, and that inevitability has been realised as users of Jailbroken iPhones are starting to report being infected with an iRickRolling worm.

The ‘ikee’ worm was first spotted over the weekend in Australia, with users posting to online forums that their Jailbroken 3GS iPhones had changed from the default wallpaper to pictures of 80’s pop singer Rick Astley, he of ‘Never Gonna give You Up’ fame and the very same man who was the focus of the RickRolling Internet meme that started in 2007 and spread like wildfire during 2008.

One iPhone user reported that the wallpaper was actually accompanied by the text: “ikee is never going to give you up”.

Although there are, as of yet, no confirmed reports of the worm spreading outside of Australia, security researchers are sure it is perfectly capable of spreading to any Jailbroken iPhone as long as the default password has not been changed after installing SSH to the device.

Graham Cluley of Sophos says “Once in place, the worm appears to attempt to find other iPhones on the mobile phone network that are similarly vulnerable, and installs itself again”.

Unfortunately, analysis by researchers at Sophos Labs would suggest that there at least four variants of the worm code so far, the latest looking to hide behind a filepath which might suggest it is connected to the Cydia application.

Nothing about the worm suggests it has been written with malice in mind, and comments in the worm code itself tend to support this, and the whole Rick Astley thing is annoying rather than malicious. However, it must not be forgotten that this worm is accessing a device without permission and changing data upon it without permission, and breaking the law in many countries as a result.

It should also not be forgotten that as code variants continue to appear it is only a matter of time, and probably not that much of it, before a malicious party uses it to deliver a payload that is a whole lot more troublesome than Rick Astley.

There is no danger to iPhone users who have not Jailbroken their devices, nor to those who have changed the password from the SSH default of Alpine.

Have you ever been stuck in the middle of a giant supermarket desperately trying to find that ‘Bombay Bad Boy’ Pot Noodle but were just too embarrassed to ask an assistant for help? Well there’s an app for that.

Just last month Apple rejected the Tesco Store and Product Finder app due to a technical issue with the way it handled being denied access to the iPhone’s location service. Well, OK, if it could not find your location it assumed you were at the Tesco.com head office in Welwyn Garden City instead. That glitch has now been rectified, and the Tesco Finder has hit the App Store.

Assuming that you are a Tesco customer, of course, then it’s actually a pretty nifty little application for the iPhone. It knows where you are and will find your nearest store, providing the street address and telephone number along with a one-click ‘directions finder’ using Google Maps. Very nice indeed. If you are already inside a Tesco, it knows that as well.

What it doesn’t seem to be able to do, at least not for me, is allow you to use the Town/City search function to locate a store that is not near to where you currently are. I just get a “Sorry: I couldn’t connect to Google.com Please check your network connection or try again later” error every single time. Not so nice.

However, once you have located a Tesco store the real star feature of this little app comes to the fore: the product search. Type in a product, any product at all, and it will tell you if the store you are in stocks it or note. But that’s not all, it will also tell you exactly where in that store it is located. How cool is that? No more cowering before the wife as you explain that you just couldn’t find the tampons (again) - they are on aisle 03 on the right side counting 11 units along from the 7th shelf up from the floor. Interestingly, the app uses exactly the same technology that Tesco.com pickers use to shop for customers’ online orders in store.

What it doesn’t tell you, and where Tesco has missed a trick, is the current in-store price and in-store stock levels. Now if it did that, how cool would it be? Very cool is the answer and you bet that Tesco is working on functionality upgrades. Indeed, Nick Lansley, the Head of Research and Development has hinted at some pretty interesting upgrades coming real soon. “one of Tesco Finder’s hidden talents is that you can search on a 13-digit barcode” he says “Just read any barcode from a grocery product and type it in”. The best is yet to come, as Lansley drops very string hints that ‘Red Laser’ functionality (another app which turns the iPhone into a barcode scanner and price comparison service rolled into one) could be coming in “a short time” to enable you to just point your iPhone at a barcode to capture it.

Oh, and just for the record, the Bombay Bad Boy Pot Noodle is on Aisle 15 on the left side counting 9 units along then the 2nd shelf up from the floor at my local store. And the beef is on aisle 18 on the left side counting 10 units along then the 7th shelf up from the floor.

When it comes to smartphone technology, fans of both the Apple iPhone and Google’s Android-based handsets are pretty vocal to say the least. I am on dodgy ground to even contemplate suggesting that one is better than the other, so I thought I might let the applications do the talking. Well, the respective App Store and Android Market numbers at any rate.

There’s no doubting that Android is growing fast when it comes to the applications side of things, with figures from Android app experts Androlib suggesting that the Android Market (the equivalent of the iPhone App Store) has grown by something in the region of 440% in just four months. Indeed, sources suggest that there are now between 9,000 and 10,000 applications available for download from the Android Market.

Pretty impressive stuff. Until you look at the iPhone App Store numbers that is. A couple of months ago Apple announced it had hit the 1.5 billion downloaded apps target, with some half a billion of them happening in the preceding quarter alone. Indeed, Apple reckons that only 2% of iPhone users have NOT downloaded an application from the App Store. On average, we are told, iPhone users will spend USD $80 on applications. In terms of choice, well the iPhone really is short circuiting the Android right now, with a staggering 65,000 plus applications available to download from the App Store. A number which would be even more impressive were it not for the strange Apple habit of rejecting perfectly acceptable applications on somewhat dodgy grounds. My particular favourite being putting the blame squarely on the shoulders of Adolf Hitler.

Can the Android catch up? Or perhaps the question should be does it want to? Some industry commentators are suggesting that it cannot because “Android is just a hobby for the company, and it will never be able to match Apple’s marketing prowess” and you know what, I think they may just have a point.

“It’s been approved” says the Apple spokesperson. “They’ve been great” says the CEO on Twitter. It’s true, Spotify for the iPhone is going to be a reality real soon now, and that could mean the death of iTunes, eventually. Spotify has already taken music loving European desktop users by storm, bringing streaming music to their computers for free in an ad-supported version. Now it is finally coming to the iPhone and that could change everything.

Of course, it changes the whole free music thing for a start. While the iPhone Spotify application itself will be free of charge, using it will most certainly not be. It will only be available to ‘Premium@ Spotify subscribers who will have to cough up £9.99 per month for the ad-free privilege.

But more importantly it changes how you get music onto your iPhone, and that means how you get music onto your iPod as well. So instead of paying 79p per track as with iTunes, users will be able to have all they can eat, streamed from an impressive library of millions of songs and all for that single monthly subscription fee.

Daniel Ek, the CEO of Swedish outfit Spotify Twittered that “I can confirm that Apple has approved the app” going on to diffuse some of the arguments that have been raging online that Apple would not approve the app due to fears of compromising the iTunes position (or duplicating core features of the iPhone) by stating “We’re happy but have had a great dialogue with Apple all the way. They’ve been great!”

Apple and iTunes can breathe easy as far as the US market is concerned and it’s not yet available there yet although it is expected to launch later in the year. Expect an Android version to follow before long as well. With 2 million users in the UK and 6 million across Europe it may not be quite in iTunes territory yet but Spotify is growing fast, making friends in the music business who like the revenue stream potential and perhaps most telling of all it has geek street cred, something that iTunes falls somewhat flat on.

Now we just have to wait and see what will happen with the Google Voice iPhone app although I must confess I am not holding my breath…

Reading the Apple response to the Federal Communications Commission questions regarding the non-appearance of Google Voice at the iPhone App Store is a bit like listening to a child explaining to the teacher why homework was not handed in on time.

What Apple has used so far are a vast range of reasons as to why Google Voice has not been granted App Store approval. It’s still being evaluated, is the core excuse. It raises privacy concerns is another good one.

My favourite has to be that it changes the iPhone user experience. Here’s how Apple explained that one according to the written response by Catherine Novelli, Apple Vice President: by replacing the core mobile phone voice functionality as well as the Apple iPhone interface it makes things different. Yes that is it, in a nutshell. Like almost every app in fact, it makes things different. That’s kind of the point of them, don’t you think? But no, Novelli insists that “Apple spent a lot of time and effort developing this distinct and innovative way to seamlessly deliver core functionality of the iPhone” and obviously anything that makes it better is bad, m’kay.

And who can argue that wrapping up telephone numbers, voicemail, SMS, calls and contacts via a neat interface and from the one Google Voice number doesn’t make the iPhone experience a whole lot better?

Oh yes, Apple can, apparently.

If Google Voice does not make an appearance soon, I fully expect Apple to tell us that it is because the dog has eaten it.