Sign in / up

back to article Superphones: A security nightmare waiting to happen

If I sit down with a PC from the late 90s and a modern PC I bought yesterday they are quite obviously the same animal. The operating system has changed, and there have been some minor innovations. With the exception of speed and support for the newest protocols, a PC from the late 90s could be used to perform exactly the same …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.

Page:

  1. Mark Jonson
    Coat

    You call them superphones...

    I call them dumb-smartphones. A smartphone is a phone running Blackberry OS or Windows Mobile. All these devices influenced by the iPhone are the same thing: a smartphone OS with the good power user features hidden, locked-out, or outright missing. And instead they have lots of DRM and protections to keep you from installing any good software (without jailbreaking/rooting). Since they are not as smart as traditional smartphones, they are dumb-smartphones.

    The iPhone was the biggest regression in technology since the ringback tone was invented. If these so-called "superphones" are better, why have they been missing features for years that old smartphone OSes have had, in some cases, for a decade? I'm talking about tethering (for free, not the carrier-controlled tethering Apple put in the iPhone), cut/copy/paste (that took 2 years to show up), and multitasking (took 3 years). The consumer traded a lot of power away to carriers and OS makers in order to have a device with a capacitive touch-screen and an accelerometer. The worst part is that they've turned a powerful productivity tool into a glorified Game-Boy, and nobody seems to care.

    0 1
  2. Ben Rosenthal

    Abstinence

    computer safety by abstinence alone sounds both terribly risky and terribly boring all at the same time, well done for coming up with that winning combination!

    I'll stick with my belt and braces thanks all the same :D

    0 0
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Like with like

    We used to talk about "convergence" as handheld computing and mobile 'phone technology merged. In that light, the comparison between 90s devices and the more modern ones are much more obvious. I'm still to see a modern 'phone as useful as my Psion 5 + old 'phone was.

    0 0

Page:

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like