To the right, you can see the small blurb that exists on Apple’s website about the built-in encryption feature on the iPhone 3GS. Wanting to find out more, I of course tried searching Apple’s website. There’s not much about it other than it’s there.

I asked some iPhone developers about this feature. In short, there isn’t much to the feature. It is transparent, always happening, and not controllable by any APIs. It can’t be turned off, it can’t be turned on. It’s always happening, always there.

On one hand, I like the simplicity and transparency of the feature. I like that it is not possible to programatically affect the encryption in any way. However, it bothers me that there isn’t a lot of details about the encryption on the website. What kind of encryption is being done? How long is the encryption key? How often is the encryption key changed? What is being done to protect the encryption key from being read either programatically or by hardware hacking methods? Does the “remote wipe” function simply cause the encryption key to be forgotten, rending the device memory complete gibberish? Is the remote wipe function controllable from ActiveSync?

Answers to these kinds of questions would undoubtedly make it easier for the iPhone 3GS to be accepted into enterprise environments. They could know, with a fair degree of certainty, that these devices have secure, encrypted storage that isn’t subject to being decrypted and read in an authorized manner.

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I spent the afternoon in Starbucks going through my work inbox. It’s still got too many items in it, but it now has less than my personal Gmail. Now it’s time to turn my attention to my personal Gmail inbox and crank out another Inbox Liquidation post:

Psiloc Cuts Prices during the Summer: During the summer, you can 1 S60 3rd edition application from Psiloc and get a second one at half off. If you buy an app for an older Nokia-type phone or a UIQ device, buy your apps for 5.99 EUR (or just under 9 USD). Psiloc has a lot of great apps. I’ve personally purchased Psiloc Connect for the N95 8GB and been very happy with it.

David Blaine’s Street Magic: See A Card app for iPhone: For $1.99, you too can amaze your friends and perform one of David Blaine’s famous card tricks using your iPhone, or so the press release goes. But let’s be honest: it’s more impressive with an actual deck of cards than it is with an iPhone app. I guess I’ll have to try it once my iPhone comes off backorder.

Your Streelights Bring You WiFi: Duratel has a very clever solution: hide those unsightly antennas for mobile phones and WiFi inside the light poles. Have to say I like this, if only to shut the NIMBYs up. Now if only AT&T would deploy a few of these in my neighborhood.

Spy On Your Employees/Spouses With FlexiSpy: It’s available for a lot of phones, including Nokia, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and iPhone. I’ll just let you read the site and decide if you think it’s a good idea. Whether it is legal or not is another thing entirely.

Park Your Number With NumberGarage: If you’re moving out of an area and you don’t want to lose that number, a service like NumberGarage is helpful. You can essentially port the number to them. For a nominal fee, they will keep the number alive for you. The PARK service just parks the number, the FORWARD service will forward calls to your number to a different one. It’s a clever service, but their PARK service needs to announce a forwarding number, just like your phone company does when they move your service to a different location.

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Despite my previous objections with the way Apple controls the App Store, not to mention my general preference for buttons over a completely touch interface, I am throwing in the towel, putting down my credit card, and buying an iPhone 3GS 32GB. Yes, I realize to some this means that hell must have frozen over and the apocalypse must be coming. What changed?

The most obvious change? I no longer work for Nokia, for one. Not that working for Nokia gave me exceptional access to the latest Nokia gear, but I did get a few handsets from them. I sport my Nokia E71 every day and occasionally use the others for various functions.

I can’t say it was one thing that pushed me over the edge. It was a lot of little things that added up to my ultimate decision to buy an iPhone 3GS. This isn’t a complete list, but here goes:

It’s Faster: One issue I have with my E71 is how slow it is when it comes to rendering web pages, not to mention other “random’ slowdowns that crop up with the phone. The iPhone 3GS has both a faster processor and twice the memory of the iPhone 3G. Those things will make a difference.

More Storage: I have a hard time conceiving how I will fill 32gb, but I’m sure I will find a way.

It’s an iPod: Actually, this part isn’t as key to me, as I don’t spend a lot of time listening to music and the like. However, I am big on podcasts. While Nokia has an app on the phone for handling podcasts, it has a number of issues. Also, for the rare times I actually do want to sync music to my Nokia phones, it is excruciatingly slow. Even Nokia’s current flagship handset takes forever to sync. Apple has this down with their iPods, iPhones, and iTunes. It all works together nicely.

It Takes Decent Video: Unlike my Nokia E71, this takes video that is on-par with my Nokia N95 8GB. This demo video that Kevin Tofel took from JKOnTheRun took was enough to convince me that it was decent.

It’s A Better Camera: It’s only a 3 megapixel camera, but it has autofocus and the ability to direct the focus with a tap on, say, someone’s face. The MacBreak Weekly gang was raving about it. I won’t have flash but, then again, the flash on the Nokia E71 is pretty worthless.

Cut and Paste: Ok, some of my earliest Nokia devices had this feature, but it’s nice to see Apple provide this feature in the iPhone 3.0 software. Hopefully it is better than the Cut and Paste on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, which suffers from S60 5th Edition and a lack of buttons.

Tethering; Ok, even my old Nokia featurephones from 2003 could do this, but it’s nice to see Apple getting with the program and adding support for this useful feature.

Stereo Bluetooth: Ever since I bought a stereo bluetooth headset, my workouts at the Y have been much better. Up until the iPhone 3GS, stereo bluetooth was simply not an option on iPhone. Now it is.

Device Encryption: This feature I didn’t even know about until I started looking on Apple’s site for things I had previously thought were worthwhile. There’s a blurb about hardware encryption on the More Features page, but there’s precious little details about what it does. If it does what Check Point’s Full Disk Encryption does for my Nokia handsets, that would be good. More information is needed.

Free WiFi from AT&T: I have been finding myself in Starbucks more and more as of late. Now that they’re all AT&T hotspots, the ability to hop-on their WiFi for free and with less hassle is a bonus.

It’s The Apps, Stupid: And, of course, the best reason of all to get a smartphone these days is the applications. While I will for sure miss Gravity, my favorite Twitter client for Nokia devices, there are plenty of fine replacements on iPhone. Not to mention replacements for some of the other apps I use, not to mention new apps I haven’t been able to try to date because I lacked an iPhone.

Of course, this is before I get the iPhone. Apple hasn’t shipped the order yet. I suspect with the Independence Day holiday, I might not get it before Monday. Assuming they’re not out of stock or anything, I should get it sometime next week. I’ll keep refreshing the order status page like an impatient geek, looking for word on when my new toy will arrive.

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Last weekend, I seriously flirted with the idea of getting an iPhone 3GS. Serious enough that I actually went into an AT&T Store, played with one for a few minute, and actually tried to buy one. But I couldn’t pull the trigger. Not that I didn’t want to, but AT&T did not allow me to.

Let me explain. In AT&T jargon, I am what you call a Corporate Responsibility User. In short, my employer pays the bill directly. Good thing, too, because my bill isn’t exactly cheap with the voice, data, and international calling/roaming addons that I have. The downside to this arrangement is that I am unable to purchase a phone from directly from an AT&T store, even if I pay with my own money.

The reason? Pretty much any phone I buy will involve a change of some sort to my account. As a CRU, I am not allowed to make any changes to my account. Heck, I can’t even call AT&T and complain about service issues as I can’t even get past the initial account check since I don’t have the “secret” information.

In the case of an iPhone purchase, the changes needed to my account would not affect the monthly rate. I have an unlimited data plan already. It would, however, add a contract, which is something I haven’t had on my line in a while. Working for Nokia does have some advantages, since I could get much better phones than AT&T was offering.

Even if I wanted to pay full price for the handset either directly from Apple or from AT&T, because pretty much any handset requires an account change of some sort, I am screwed. I cannot buy it from Apple or AT&T directly. I have to go through my employer, which I plan on doing for the iPhone 3GS within the next few days.

Can someone please explain why AT&T–or any operator for that matter–has to know what kind of handset I have? Shouldn’t handsets conform to the relevant standards and that be enough for the operators? How come this tying of phones to service provider isn’t illegal everywhere?

If an operator tried to tie a phone to a specific landline network, it would be illegal in the United States, thanks to the Carterfone ruling. How come when we add a wireless radio to the phone, that rule suddenly doesn’t apply?

I’m not saying that carriers can’t sell subsidized phones in exchange for a contract commitment. That’s their choice. But making it so I cannot buy a phone outright because it is inexorably tied to my service? It should be illegal.

It’s that time again where I sift through the debris in my inbox and pick five or so things to write briefly about. It’s kind of like Stefan Constantinescu’s series called Trimming in Public except I only write about the things that interest me. I think I’ll also take a cue and give it a cute name: “Inbox Liquidation”

Trapster Goes iPhone 3.0 and Android: While this isn’t a service I’ve used in quite a while, I love the idea of a user-generated speed trap tracking system. Trapster has been around for at least a year and now supports the iPhone 3.0 firmware, exploiting to great effect the new mapping APIs as well as the background notification services, making it much quicker to report traps as well as have the ability to receive trap alerts without having to run the Trapster application in the foreground! Of course, if you have an Android phone, you’re covered as well since you can run the app in the background.

ShoZu Going Pay, Sort Of: ShoZu is an application that takes pictures from your phone and automatically puts it in social networks and the like online. Their app had been free, but it looks like they will move the application to the various phone application stores and charge for the app. They are already doing this for the iPhone version of the app. It’s an interesting way to pay for what is essentially a “service”–buy an app to access said service. Not sure how this is going to play with ShoZu users, or how it’s going to increase their user base, but it will be interesting to see.

The Nokia Glock Model 40: My dad sent me this picture. It gives the phrase “sidetalking” a whole new meaning, if you catch my drift.

OnRelay Brings Fixed Mobile Convergence to Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1: OnRelay is announcing on 23 June 2009 that they are collaborating with Sony Ericsson to bring OnRelay’s Mobile PBX software onto the Sony Ericsson device. My response: So what? This might have been interesting several years ago, but the world has already converged on the mobile phone. PBXes do nothing for me, nor do they do anything for most of the people I work with.

While I was on my trip to Israel, I had to factory default my Nokia E71 because it was starting to act funny. While reinstalling RoadSync, Gravity, and most of my other apps wasn’t a big deal, as I keep copies on my MicroSD card for just this reason, reinstalling one of them–one I bought from Nokia’s Ovi Store–turned out to be not possible.

While I grumble with the fact that mobile apps are tied to the IMEI of the handset–think of it as a unique serial number for a GSM-based mobile phone–it’s a fact of life I’ve grown used to. Some application providers do not allow you to move applications between handsets, others do. Either way, getting an application reinstalled on the same device you purchased it for should be doable.

I had saved the installation SIS file for JoikuSpot on my MicroSD card, so I reinstalled it. However, it was not automatically licensed, so it came up in demo mode. I next tried to go to the Ovi Store on that very same E71 I purchased it on. I went to the “My Stuff” section in the Ovi Store app:

Yup, there’s JoikuSpot. I click on it:

Hey wait, didn’t I buy this app already? From this phone? Why would I want to buy it again. Nowhere on this page does it give me the option to redownload. Nokia, you know I bought this app, why won’t you let me download it?

I checked my email for the receipt to see if there was a license key:

Nope, not there. So I go to Ovi Store on the web. There is nothing in their FAQ about what happens after you download an app. What? Ok, time for the contact page. It appears to be a general Ovi contact form. Nothing about botched orders, order status, or anything on this contact page.

Clearly, Nokia didn’t think this part out. And I know I’m not the only one who has had problems. Matt Miller had issues getting his app redownloaded as did many of Ricky Cadden’s readers.

I can’t believe that Nokia had absolutely no foresight that a download failure might happen or someone might have to reformat their phone and redownload an app. There is absolutely no provisions made for these situations other than contacting Nokia Care, which who knows how long that will take to properly respond.

Having worked for Nokia and met some of the people in the Care organization, I know that people inside Nokia care about these things and are likely as frustrated as us end users are over the stupidity of this situation. That being said, until Nokia makes it so you can easily redownload purchased apps from the Ovi Store and/or provide the license code as part of the purchase process, I cannot and will not recommend that anyone by any apps from the Ovi Store.

Hopefully, someone had a happy ending with one of these experiences. Did anyone either get their money back or get another chance to redownload their app from the Ovi Store? Let me know your thoughts.

Keyboards are a rather personal thing. You either like them or you don’t and there is plenty of wiggle room depending on what is important to you.

Adesso’s PR firm sent me a Wireless Media Center Keyboard with Optical Trackball to review. It is geared for people with media center PCs, though it works ok with my Mac as well.

The unit comes with a USB dongle that blinks blue whenever you push keys on your keyboard. It communicates with the keyboard over 2.4 Ghz, which is also used by Bluetooth and WiFi. I haven’t noticed any interference problems as of yet, but the keyboard and mouse are less than 1 foot apart in my normal usage. Supposedly it works up to 100 feet away, but unless you had Frank’s 2000 inch TV hooked up to your computer, I doubt you could actually see what you were typing on the computer from that far away.

The keyboard has some media keys to control audio, the TV channel, and the volume. Surprisingly, most of these keys actually work on iTunes on the Mac just fine. The channel buttons seem to function as a sort of page-up/page-down kind of thing. There are also a row of 8 buttons along the top that don’t appear to do anything on the Mac, but are supposedly for Windows Media Center .

The other important feature this keyboard has is a track bar, scroll wheel, and mouse. They work well enough, but I would have preferred the buttons to be to either side of the trackball (e.g. for left and right clicks) instead of being on the opposite side of the keyboard from the trackball!

I find that certain keys on this keyboard tend to require a bit more force to ensure they register properly, like the right shift key and the spacebar. This is not a unique problem to this keyboard as I find that many modern keyboards suffer from this “mushmellow” syndrome. I also find some keys are put in somewhat odd spots, which often happens when keyboards are made smaller.

What’s the verdict for $74.99 US? I like the wire-free operation, but it’s not necessary as I’m usually sitting at a desk anyway. I’m also not as big on controlling media from my keyboard. It would be great for that, of course, but its not something I do with my computer on a regular basis. It’s not a great fit for me, but if I needed a keyboard for a media center PC, I’d consider getting this one.

If you’ve seen the movie Soylent Green, or even if you haven’t, you know what the punchline to this story is. Even if you do know the punchline, read on.

Humans are undeniably social creatures who crave connections to other humans. Email, IM, Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, SMS, and many others are services that, at their core, serve one of our most basic needs as humans: to connect with other humans.

As geeks, technologists, marketers, or what-have-you, it’s real easy to lose sight of the people and focus on the technology and what it enables. Or get into endless debates why service X is better than service Y for a specific purpose.

While I was traveling to Israel, in one of the rare moments where I actually had time to peek at Twitter, I saw a comment from Lee Dryburgh, who questioned the popularity of Twitter:

Twitter is just slow public IM coupled with SMS+RSS.I still fail to see the greatness in Twitter as a specific platform or technology.:(

My immediate response, pretty much says it all:

@leedryburgh Why Twitter is popular is like Soylent Green: it’s people. Without people, it’s nothing.

Why Twitter became popular is the subject of some speculation. From my point of view, it doesn’t matter what caused Twitter to become wildly popular. The very fact there is such a mass of people using Twitter makes it matter. Even if there is a superior technology to Twitter, if few people use the technology, it doesn’t really matter.

I have settled on both Twitter and Facebook as the “social networks” I use on a regular basis. I may have started using Twitter for merely technical reasons, and initially left because of them, but I came back for the people. The reason I joined and started using Facebook regularly was the same–the people.

I’ll say it again: Social networking is like Soylent Green: it’s people. Without people, social networking is nothing. Let’s not forget that.

A friend of mine’s post got me thinking about what I’m hearing from my friends who, technically, still work for Nokia, though they have no job. They were the people that either were not offered a job at Check Point Software when they bought our business from Nokia or declined to take an offer.

I won’t get into the specifics of what I’ve heard, but it isn’t good. The double whammy of the global recession and market pressures from Apple and RIM is shaking Nokia to its very core. Nokia is shedding people, reorganizing, and hopefully, trying to get more focused.

While I don’t truly have any inside information, I suspect we’ll see Nokia announce more layoffs over the next several months. We will hear more about how Nokia is refocusing. The company that emerges from this process, which I suspect will take a couple of years or more, will be very different than the one I spent 10 years at. Hopefully leaner, meaner, and hungrier, prepared to properly address triple-threat of RIM, Apple, and the emerging threat of Google via Androio.

What will this company look like? What will this company do? And will it be too late? It all remains to be seen.

It’s that time again:

FreeConferencing.com Launches: Until they do something to equalize inter-carrier compensation between most civilized parts of the United States and rural locations, services like FreeConferenceCall.com and now FreeConferencing.com will continue to exist and be profitable. By hosting these services in, say, rural Iowa, they actually make a small amount of money per minute on incoming calls. Anyway, FreeConferencing.com is a way to do a one-to-many call, complete with a web-based console to manage the call.

Vonage Trying To Act Like Mobile Phone Carriers: Vonage, the VoIP landline replacement service provider that refuses to die, is now offering a deal where you can sign up and not pay for equipment, shipping, or activation. The catch? You have to sign a two year agreement complete with early termination fees that are, according to my calculations, worse than a mobile phone contract.

iPopperz Fashion Earphones: Personally not my thing, but these are relatively inexpensive, in-ear haedphones with a number of styles, colors, and whatnot. I would consider buying the black, green, and black pair. One cool thing: they sell replacement earpads. Granted, there is a huge amount of markup there, but it’s the first time I’ve seen them available.

Bad Experience on DeFi Mobile: I briefly wrote about DeFi Mobile in October. Wasn’t sure how well the service was going to be when it went live, but someone forwarded me some correspondence to and from the company related to their experience. In short: it was bad voice quality and improper CallerID. Anyone have a good experience with DeFi Mobile?

Qwest Offering Free WiFi Nationwide: If you happen to live in an area where Qwest is your local exchange carrier and you get high speed Internet from them, now you can take it with you–sort of. Qwest has signed a deal with AT&T to provide Qwest customers free WiFi at 17,000 AT&T operated WiFi hotspots. Personally, I think it’s worth $9.95 a month for Boingo, which offers WiFi at AT&T locations and a whole bunch more!