In the last three years, IT security issues haven’t changed that much - but perceptions might have. Trojans and worms might have taken over from viruses, but the problem is still a combination of security holes, social engineering and putting protection in the right place without destroying productivity.

We’re pleased to see Microsoft finally admit that, yes, Windows security could do with a helping hand. If you’re not running an anti-virus or anti-malware application you really don’t have any excuses any more. Microsoft Security Essentials isn’t a bells and whistles security package like McAfee or Norton, or even AVG. It is, to steal a cliche, what it is. And that’s an easy to download, quick to install, and simple to use anti-malware package.

MSE is also pleasantly processor friendly, with very little impact on performance - even on Atom netbooks. With low-powered devices increasingly common (and Windows 7 likely to be on of the main operating systems on the next generation of devices) it’s good to see a package that respects your CPU and still manages to keep you safe and secure. What Microsoft has learnt, and it’s something that other security vendors are also learning, is that the security you have is a lot better than no security at all. Sure some people want something that tells them every time there’s a possible threat, and that inspects every packet going in and out of a network connection - but what most people want (and what most people need) is a tool that just gives them enough protection to keep the most egregious malware away, blocking trojans and spyware, as well as keeping them safe from good old-fashioned viruses.

That’s what MSE is, and that’s all it is planned to be. It’s the tool I’d give my sweet white-haired retired-school teacher mother. And that’s probably the best recommendation you’d hear from me!

There’s only one place that security through obscurity works, and that’s in the criminal coding fraternity. If you use an OS that only another 5 people in the world use, it’s not worth the effort to hack into that OS. When Apple had 2% or 5% of the market, it could safely claim that Macs were more secure because they were less of a target and any security holes would get ignored by hackers. Hit enough market share and you have to get a bit more protection - especially as hackers target the apps that run on the platform and the Web pages users visit.

We’re glad to see that Apple has gone on a security hiring spree recently; security experts and cryptographers from companies like PGP and OLPC are now working on security at Apple. That doesn’t mean Macs and iPhones are instantly more secure than they were last week; but it does mean Apple isn’t sweeping the security problem under the keyboard any more.

And with this post it’s time to bid you all farewell. We’ve been writing this blog for the last three years, since the launch of IT Pro. All good things must come to an end, and it’s time for us to pack up our keyboards and ride off into the sunset. We’ve had fun writing here, and we hope you’ve had fun reading us.

–Mary and Simon

If Google’s Android OS is open source, why is the company going after an Android developer? Because not everything that you think of as Android is actually open source.
CyanogenMod http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ is an alternative, unauthorised, third-party version of Android for Android phones. As Android is an open source operating system, why has Google hit the developer behind it with a cease and desist letter? Because the Google Maps, Android Market, Google Talk, Gmail and YouTube applications on Google’s own Android builds are Android apps rather than part of the OS - and they’re not open source. That means Google has every right to tell the developer behind Cyanogen that he can’t distribute them as part of his build http://androidandme.com/2009/09/hacks/cyanogenmod-in-trouble. Google told Intel the same thing back in the spring when it was trying out Android on netbooks. Search, and the apps powered by search, are where Google makes its money and they’re not open source and you can’t use them without permission. Parts of the Android SDK are proprietary as well.
Microsoft has never seriously gone after the developers on sites like XDA Developers who create ‘cooked’ ROMs for  Windows Mobile devices. That might be because Microsoft makes its Windows Mobile money by selling licences to the phone manufacturers. There’s also the fact that many of the XDA developers work for phone manufacturers and mobile operators and have a fairly good understanding of what you don’t want a phone to be able to do - as least as far as the phone network is concerned.
The mobile networks have a rather ambivalent attitude to open source on phones. On one hand, anything that makes it easier to make powerful phones cheaply is good, because it costs them less to subsidise. Plus open source should make it cheap for developers to create apps for the platform. This is a big change in attitude because an open, easy to configure, easy to develop for platform is also very scary for the operators because they’re paranoid about a rogue - or just badly-written - app or phone taking down the phone network. That’s why the OpenMoko phone - a truly open phone - never got very far; the operators were just too worried about having it on their network.
Vodafone’s support of the JIL platform in the 360 launch shows that the networks have realised - with a lot of help from the iPhone app store - that having lots of apps on a phone is a good thing. The reason Windows Mobile looks so far behind in the app space isn’t that it’s hard to develop good apps for - although the mix of screen resolutions and Compact and Micro Framework versions certainly doesn’t help. It isn’t just that it’s too complicated to find, install and uninstall apps (I can’t find a good version of Spider solitaire from a site that I trust and I can’t find a way to get Windows Live off now that I’ve realised that having Hotmail on my phone isn’t worth it if it’s going to slow down the mail interface this much). It’s also that the over-cautious operators held back the first wave of app developers by insisting on lengthy certification and approval systems.

The operators are a lot more confident now (although there were still some nerves at the Vodafone 360 launch yesterday -  “Is opening up our network services like this a good thing?” asked one spokesperson rhetorically; “we hope so!”). It’s also interesting that despite being a member of the Open Handset Alliance, instead of following Motorola down the Android route Vodafone has put MotoBlur-competitor Vodafone People onto the LiMo platform instead. Linux Mobile (and Maemo and Moblin) aren’t just different flavours of Linux from Android (which Google says is built on the Linux kernel, but is not actually Linux); they’re Linux-based mobile operating systems that Google doesn’t control.

Handset manufacturers and operators like Linux phones for lots of reasons. They like open source for lots of reasons. But for an industry that contributes as much to UK GDP as the oil and gas industry, few of those reasons are connected with the philosophy of openness that draws developers like Cyanogen.

–Mary

If you’re an Exchange admin, use the “Require encryption on the device” policy, and you’ve got users out there who are using first and second generation iPhones to get their mail over Exchange ActiveSync, then be prepared for a whole rush of support calls as users update to the latest version of the iPhone OS.

Why?

Because iPhones have stopped lying to Exchange servers.

The hardware on earlier iPhone models doesn’t have the power needed to support whole device encryption -you need the 3GS for that - and  that means that if your business needs to secure its mail, then most of the iPhones out there can’t be trusted. Apple’s earlier versions of the iPhone email software just ignored that policy setting, and reported back that all policies had been applied.

That meant that devices that should have been encrypted (either for corporate or regulatory reasons)  weren’t - and all the mail on them was available for anyone with a USB connection and the appropriate software.

As I’m sure you can guess, that drove a coach and horses through your  security policies, and opened your business up to all sorts of regulatory problems.

Now at least those phones will stop getting mail.

But it’s a bit of a worrying thought that one of the most popular phones in the world was skating past security policies. Of course that leaves us with two more worrying thoughts:

First, how many other phones out there are doing just that without you knowing?

And secondly, just how are you going to tell your bosses that they can’t use their phones for email any more?

Windows 7 is done, but the massive Microsoft machinery is grinding slowly through the process of localising it into multiple languages, burning discs, printing, stuffing and shipping boxes and getting the PC manufacturers on the starting line. Snow Leopard is done and it went on sale on Friday. Does that mean Apple is more nimble - or just in more of a hurry?

Since Snow Leopard went on sale there’s been a flurry of posts and questions - about application compatibility. We knew Snow Leopard itself wouldn’t run on PowerPC Macs because they don’t have the Intel chips that the new features rely on, but unlike Microsoft’s massive app testing and beta program Apple hadn’t been pushing out details about application compatibility. Running 32-bit apps on a 64-bit system often causes problems. Apple was prepared for this; the reviewer’s guide says “During installation, Snow Leopard checks your applications for compatibility, and sets aside any incompatible applications that are known to create instability in Snow Leopard” and this page on the Apple support site http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3258 lists a handful of apps that are known to have problems. Most of them are the usual suspects; low-level storage and security software that has to be updated with any operating system release. But a wireless broadband card, or Adobe Director MX 2004? That’s down to a large number of API changes, designed to remove old bugs - but as Microsoft has often found, one developer’s bug is another developer’s feature and fixing it can break an app.

There was quite the snowstorm of discussion at John Nack’s blog about Adobe products and Snow Leopard. http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/snow_leopard/ The official policy; CS4 is supported on Mac OS X 10.6, although Version Cue doesn’t work, CS3 isn’t supported. The unofficial line; CS3 “works fine” “to the best of our knowledge”; cue discussion about how long you should support old software on a new platform and whether you should delay creating the Cocoa version of Photoshop to go back and do the testing. But beyond the question of what resources Adobe could or should devote to supporting an OS update when it’s company policy not to put out updates to versions of software it no longer sells, is the question of how much time Apple has spent on testing third-party apps - and how much it could be telling users about potential compatibility issues. Apple certainly works very closely with the Photoshop team and would know about any problems they found (”If we found issues, we worked directly with Apple to get them fixed,” blogged Photoshop quality assurance manager David Howe) but there’s nothing about Version Cue on the support pages.

For Windows 7, Microsoft worked with 45,000 hardware and software developers, from IT departments inside businesses to one-man-bands to the big software and hardware names. There’s a long list of just a proportion of the devices tested at http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/10/primer-on-device-support-and-testing-for-windows-7.aspx and when you can actually buy Windows 7, the Windows Upgrade Advisor will be out of beta (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1b544e90-7659-4bd9-9e51-2497c146af15) - this checks the hardware and software you have installed -  the Vista Compatibility Center http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/ will turn into the Windows 7 Compatibility Center where you can look up that Photoshop Album needs a free upgrade to v3.2 and Corel makes you pay to upgrade to Paint Shop Pro X2. We’re still impressed by the range of hardware and software Windows 7 supports; at the end of last week our elderly Elonex Media Center PC picked up a new driver for the Hauppauge TV card that hadn’t worked for years and suddenly offered up 98 Freeview TV and radio channels.

Apple doesn’t give Mac users this level of detail (there’s a list of supported printers and scanners at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3669 but nothing official for software), so they’re gathering it informally; check http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/ for a long list of apps that do and don’t have problems.

It’s unlikely that any of these application compatibility problems mean that Snow Leopard wasn’t ready to ship. But perhaps Apple isn’t able to test as widely as Microsoft does or perhaps it was so keen to get Snow Leopard on sale to deflate some of the Windows 7 momentum that it didn’t take the time to document the issues. Or is it the back to school market that Apple is chasing, now rather dominated by netbooks (which DisplaySearch now puts at 22% of all personal computers sold)? 
-Mary

But is the Booklet a page turner? Intel and Nokia’s much-vaunted partnership to create a new generation of what Kai Öistämö, Nokia’s executive Vice President of devices  called “the next wave of mobile technology” powered by Maemo or Moblin mobile Linux and Intel chips must be a pretty long-term venture. We’ve heard nothing more about it since June and the first Intel-powered Nokia device is a Windows netbook, probably designed to compete with Qualcomm’s promised Smartbook Snapdragon devices (lighter, thinner netbooks that really will run Linux), and with Android and Chrome OS netbooks when they come along.

Is it the convergence of phone and netbook that Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (OPK for short) hinted at just a few days ago? The 12-hour battery life is good for a netbook (if you can get it without turning off the Wi-Fi and dimming the screen to illegibility); if you have to recharge a 3G phone every night, people complain. It does have 3G and GPS, so it will be interesting to see if the 12 hour battery life includes turning those on. Along with the HDMI output, that’s a similar spec to Qualcomm’s Smartbook, which also promises to be 2cm thick (and quite a bit lighter, at around 900g). Of course the Smartbook is an unproven concept, whereas cheap and cheerful netbooks are big sellers (though Nokia hasn’t put a price on the Booklet yet).

The Booklet name is probably just a play on being a smaller notebook without the ubiquitous netbook name rather than an attempt to evoke epaper and pre-empt whatever Apple might or might not one day launch as a tablet. Unless the Ovi apps that Nokia is promising take advantage of the power of the PC to do more than they could on a smartphone, it’s all a bit me-too.

Despite being just about the biggest phone manufacturer worldwide, Nokia has been struggling to match the success of the iPhone and the popularity of the App Store; according to the FT, it’s reminding employees of the new focus on apps and services by splashing the number of subscribers to Ovi services onto screens around its Espoo headquarters. And over in Silicon Valley, Henry Tirri, the head of the Nokia Research Center is looking at what kind of innovative services you can create using Nokia’s billions of existing handsets as sensors. Want to know if a road is jammed with traffic or a bar is full of people dancing or if the Starbucks you’re navigating to is probably closed? There are probably enough Nokia devices on the road, in the bar and in the coffee shop (during opening hours for comparison) for a smart service to tell you that the road is solid, the bar is jumping (60% chance it’s salsa dancing) and the Starbucks is dark.

That’s why Tirri sounds convincing when he pitches you a service Microsoft, Google, TomTom and dozens of other companies are working on: it’s about the phones. “Not deliberately but more by serendipity this has developed to be the electronic equipment that’s the closest and most personal, that’s with you most of the time; you really take care of it. This has evolved to be the device it is because of the first killer function, voice and communication. We are simply piggybacking on the fact that these are where people are and we can use them as context generators. We have the most of them on earth; a billion of them. By the law of large numbers we are simply in the best position of utilising context - like Google is on search.”

Context is whether the bar is busy or the shop is open - and it’s what makes services really useful. If there are 15 coffee shops ‘close’ to me, I want the one I can get to without getting stuck in traffic and I want the one that’s actually open, not the one that just says it should be open on its Web site. Is the user trying to VPN in from an Internet cafe already on the plane home? But it relies on those billions of phones acting as sensors and that means not getting in anyone’s way.

Tirri’s team has come up with a battery-friendly way of gathering location information that can generate context, without leaving GPS on all the time; virtual ‘trip lines’ that turn on the GPS sensor at a specific point (approximated from the cell location) to send an accurate position. This neatly avoids the worries of anonymising GPS data (In 2007, Microsoft Research was able to infer the home address of nearly every employee in an ‘anonymous’ location trial; researcher John Krumm only managed to find names for 5% of the employees using Live Search and he had to add false location information to really offer privacy to people offering ‘anonymous’ information about their travels).

If Ovi Maps on the Booklet starts to deliver context, it would be something really different. Until then, it sounds like just another shiny netbook.
-Mary

Have Google and Microsoft swapped places? Are Microsoft and Adobe going to race each other to open source key technologies as Google gets bogged down by antitrust investigations over Google Books? Not really – but Google is in line for some antitrust grief.

Welcome as the open source announcements this week are, don’t read the wrong things into them. This isn’t religion.

Adobe doesn’t want to open source Flash; it’s a huge business for them. They want phone manufacturers to pay to put Flash on mobile; but Apple said no and Mozilla and Google said ‘video on HTML 5, in Android and Fennec’. Adobe’s response was the Open Screen Project, starting with getting the chip vendors to support Flash and offering a ‘pre-integrated’ version of the Flash run-time. Taking it down to the chip level isn’t just about the multimedia support; it means that none of the hardware guys will want to miss out on a feature their competitors are going to have.

Adobe is swapping licence revenues on phones for ubiquity on phones; as Adobe’s Zeke Koch puts it “now you can have it for free - in return you have to make it open.” That’s open as in ‘Adobe gets to check it’ rather than open as in source. And it means users don’t go off Flash because of shoddy implementation, Flash stays in demand and Adobe can make money on the Flash development tools – and get in a few digs at anyone who doesn’t support Flash as not being open.

And while releasing Linux drivers under the GPL is a good thing both for Hyper-V and anyone who is fed up with the religious debates over operating systems and licence philosophies and Microsoft deserves credit for working through the problems, it’s possible Microsoft didn’t originally plan to release its drivers under the GPL. Supporting Linux in enlightened mode on Hyper-V is crucial; without it VMware can boast better support for more server OS’s. But according to a blogger who calls himself Linux Network Plumber, in the first version “the driver had both open-source components which were under GPL, and statically linked to several binary parts. The GPL does not permit mixing of closed and open source parts, so this was an obvious violation of the license.”

And actually, the most credit here goes to the anonymous Plumber who, rather than “creating noise” (and you can imagine the noise if Microsoft had been accused of violating the GPL) contacted Novell to find the right person to approach at Microsoft. Result: less of a news story, more of an actual result, grown-up behaviour all round.

As for Google, the EU has a hearing on Google’s acquisition on publishing rights scheduled for September 7th (expect the estate of George Orwell to have an opinion); the House Judiciary Committee might meet sooner than that. Google brushes both off as ‘fact finding exercises’ but Christine Varney  predicts “a repeat of Microsoft”. As the attorney who got Netscape’s case all the way to the anti-trust settlement, she should know.
-Mary

On a smartphone, passwords are even more irritating than ever, especially on a soft keyboard that’s so sure it knows what you want to type that the default is to correct what you actually wrote. That’s only a trimester if the phone has as big a vocabulary as you do.

For instance, when I started writing this on my Samsung Blackjack II with xt9, what I typed in the previous sentence was ‘timesaver’ - before xt9 ‘ corrected’ it… xt9 gives you the option to stick with your actual typing as long as you notice the change and the equally aggressive correction on the iPhone does the same (though I’ve never managed it myself), but it’s one more way that passwords are more likely to trip you up than keep you secure. Let alone that the UK now has the worst information theft figures in Europe, even though the French have the least secure passwords.

Switching to information cards where claims like who I am and whether I’m over 18 are encrypted, hashed and sent on demand to replace simple username and password makes logging on simpler and more secure, and makes it possible to add extra authentication. After complaining about Microsoft not issuing secure ‘managed’ cards I’ve been told to wait a few days for a major announcement; it might be the Equifax over-18 I-card service https://equifaxicards.com/imover/overview.do (only for the US at the moment, but it’s the first major public verified information card and it will soon be followed by cards to prove your credit rating, contact details or membership).

So that leaves getting sites and services to accept information cards - and being able to use them on any computer. They’re built into Vista, Windows 7 and any PC with IE7, plus there are open source plugins for Firefox and Safari.

Apple’s switch from basing its laptops on Intel chipsets to NVIDIA’s new 9400M series has raised more than a few eyebrows. There’s a good reason for that switch, as I discovered when I had a conversation with NVIDIA’s Rene Haas last week.

In the past mobile graphics chips have been a poor cousin to their desktop relations. Some may have the same product numbers, but a fraction of the power. With the advent of technologies like OpenGL and the rise of General Purpose GPU computing (GPGPU), laptop GPUs looked like they were being left far behind. Popular software is starting to take advantage of GPU computing, with companies like Adobe taking advantage of GPU programming to accelerate and smooth operations in its latest version of the CS imaging and design suite. You couldn’t get the smooth rotations and zooms in Photoshop CS4 without OpenGL - and if your chipset doesn’t support it, you’ll just get an error message.

Apple’s new machines aren’t just using the 9400M for OpenGL. There’s a lot more to the chips than GPUs (though the 16 GPU cores take up most of the silicon). The chips also include much of the core system hardware you usually find as separate chips. The result brings the Northbridge and Southbridge into the same package, using much less real estate and allowing motherboards to be less than 1/2 the size, and at the same time giving increased graphics performance for the same power footprint. Laptops get better gaming performance, and applications get better user interface effects.

The MacBook’s improved video performance has been noticed, and it’s down to the 9400M’s built-in HD video support. There’s hardware support for the H.264 HD video codec Apple uses for its iTunes movies, as well as support for many of the decryption techniques needed to work with DVDs and BluRay. While Apple may not support BluRay yet, Windows will with Vista’s SP2 release, and NVIDIA’s chips handle the AES encryption used on BluRay discs, as well as handling high-end features like BD-Live.

The MacBook Pro shows off another of NVIDIA’s features, Hybrid SLI, which lets hardware developers add a second GPU for more processing power when it’s needed - turning it off when it’s additional boost is unnecessary. The Pro has an additional 9600MGT which can be used for gaming or intensive image processing - using more power than when a single GPU is used for word processing or web browsing

So why is NVIDIA producing this new chip? The main reason is the size of the laptop market. New laptops will outsell desktops by a large margin by 2012, and users want the same performance in their bags as well as on their desks. Only a small proportion of notebooks have discrete GPUs, with most using integrated graphics. GPUs need to compete with integrated chipsets on price, form factor and performance, so this is where a new single chip solution comes in to play.

There an interesting caveat to this story, too. NVIDIA’s CUDA GPGPU framework has become an interesting tool for developers who want to work with massively parallel application programming on GPUs. In the past it’s been resistant to talking about other GPGPU frameworks - but the Apple relationship is changing that. Apple has announced that it wil be supporting the OpenCL GPGPU APIs in the Snow Leopard release of OS X, and as a result, NVIDIA will be supporting OpenCL access to its CUDA frameworks. Supercomputer performance in a laptop will be a very interesting side effect of the 9400M chips.

This isn’t an exclusive deal with Apple, either. There will be more laptop manufacturers switching to this approach in future - so we can look forward to a much better laptop experience with Windows and Linux in the future.

–Simon

The other day I finally bit the bullet, and traded in my old Blackberry Pearl for a shiny iPhone. I’d been using one to write some tutorials for IT Pro, and had finally got used to its touch keyboard - and had become used to the large screen and the high quality web browsing experience. I’d also started playing with the AppStore, and had found applications like Evernote, which promised to bring web, phone and desktop together. My memory is pretty bad most of the time, and a tool that could help me remember the things I’d seen seemed to be a rather good idea.

There was just one problem - the iPhone’s camera. I’m not complaining about its 2Mpx resolution, or even the lack of a video feed. They’re all par for the course with a cameraphone (unless you plump for those phones that are more camera than phone), and the iPhone’s is actually a pretty decent camera - most of the time. Where it falls down is its focal length. It’s great for portraits, for landscapes, as it’s a fixed focus camera that can keep most things in focus - as long as they’re more than about three feet away.

Using Evernote I found I was wanting to take photographs of pieces of text: the backs of business cards, notes scrawled on napkins, whiteboards. Evernote has a good online OCR service, putting OCR in the cloud and not on the phone, but it couldn’t cope with the iPhone’s blurry out of focus images.

Last week I got an email from the PR for Griffin, best known as one of the original iPod accessory companies. They’d just announced a new “business” case for the iPhone 3G, one that included what could be the solution to my iPhone text photography problem.

What was it?

A macro lens.

A couple of years ago Mary and I looked at a barcode recognition service that Microsoft Research was trying out. Like me, they’d found that phone cameras couldn’t cope with close-ups. They’d chosen to have stick on macro lenses manufactured, and for some time my tubby HTC Titan had a strange extra lens on the back.

Griffin’s Clarifi case is less obtrusive, with a little extra lens that slides over the camera slot in the case. It’s a workable solution, and it’s easy to quickly put the lens in place when you want to take a close-up photograph.

The million dollar question is, of course, “does it work?”. The answer is a qualified yes. It’s not perfect (but then plastic lenses rarely are), but it is a considerable improvement over Apple’s standalone fixed-focus implementation.

Here’s the before:

And here’s the after:

It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well!

One more step along the road to finding my ideal portable device.

I’ve been spending some time with the iPhone 2.0 software, and I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised with many of the new enterprise features.

Setting up an iPhone to connect to an Exchange server was quick, and relatively painless. Apple’s implementation of ActiveSync supports self-issued server certificates directly, and so smaller businesses can work the CEO’s iPhone without having to set up an expensive third-part certificate. Apple does provide a tool for helping configure multiple devices, and if you don’t use it each phone will have to be set up by hand, so you may prefer to stick with Blackberry or Windows Mobile for ease of management.

There is one big omission which will hamper the iPhone’s enterprise uptake: mail isn’t encrypted. So if your business is regulated in any way, and your staff work with sensitive information, then the iPhone - version 2.0 or not - will be strictly off limits. The fact there’s also no remote wipe (Apple says you can use Exchange’s tools for this, but our test device couldn’t be seen in Exchange’s device management tools) or device management beyond setup tools will also count against Apple’s latest software releases. Until Apple really understands the needs of enterprises the iPhone will remain the shiny phone on the CEO’s desk, not the workhorse device used by hundreds and thousands of staff.

Still, it is only a second generation device, and there’s plenty of time for Apple to fix its deficiencies.

If you really do want to use the iPhone with Exchange, what’s the experience like? We took some screenshots to show you what you and your users will see.

Making the inital connection is easy - all you need are an email address, a user name and password, and the DNS name of the Exchange server on the public internet. Once connected to an Exchange server you can manage accounts from the iPhone’s settings menu. You’re able to quickly switch functions, as well as choosing just how much mail is synchronised.

Mail can be pushed automatically using Exchange’s built-in ActiveSync (Apple has licensed it from Microsoft), or can be collected on a schedule. If you’re roaming and need to keep data bills to a minimum, switching to a manual fetch will help keep data traffic to a minimum - as well as increasing battery life!

Once you’ve set up Exchange mail, you’ll be able to see a list of all the mail folders in your Exchange account. The iPhone (unlike other mobile devices) will only automatically synchronise your main inbox, and you’ll need to manually download the contents of any other folders you wish to read.

Of course Apple handles HTML mail just fine, and you’ll get a good overview of your mailbox contents with headers and the first couple of lines of any message.

Mail doesn’t take up that much space - a large Exchange account (with sensible download windows) will only take a few tens of MB out of the iPhone’s 8 or 16GB storage. That leaves you plenty of space for applications - which already include tools from Salesforce.com and from Oracle. Applications download from the App Store, and open from the familiar launcher.

(Oh yes, and the new iPhone software makes it easy to take screenshots - just hold down the home button and tap the power switch. The screen will fade for a moment and you’ll find the image in the device’s camera roll.)

–Simon