Mobile phones - OT

[Tim Watts]

Why are they popular with chavs?

[Tim Watts]

Missed that...

am not sure what the £50 up fronts are like, but checking some reviews would be easy. £10 PAYG is on though.

[dennis]

They are certainly popular with ~17 year olds. They use BBM to send allsorts of cr@p like some use usenet for.

As for mail security.. you really need to run a corporate mail server and point all the mail clients at it, if you use the networks server you have no idea where the mail is going. You also need encrypted data. This applies to PCs and to mobile phones.

[Huge]

Blackberry Instant Messenger. It's free.

(And very secure, although I doubt the chavs know or care about this.)

[Andrew May]

I'm sure they do. How else do you organise a riot?

[dennis]

Secure from what/who? They keep all the messages so someone can read and use them.

[Tim Watts]

I see...

So Android/iPhone with a company IMAP server running SSL/TLS woul be just as good?

The only corporate feature I can see is the ability to lock down the device.

[Huge]

Not just lockdown, but remote management, wipe, encrypted filesystems, ability to remotely identify jailbroken devices, remote app install and doubtless a few others I've forgotten.

[Andy Burns]

I think so, that's how I connect mine, IMAPS and SMTPS (on the submission port 587 to avoid blocking of port 25 by the phone network)

If you "enslave" an Android device (or an iThing) to an Exchange server using Activesync, that can force a certain minumum length and maximum life of a PIN and wipe the device if locked out after a certain number of attempts.

[Peter Johnson]

The only 'bad news' aspect of that for consumers may be the lack of new models. Any warranty service required will still be available. And the mobile phone companies that provide BlackBerry services for consumers aren't going to switch them off whilst they still have viable numbers of consumers paying to use them. Apart, possibly, from the new models aspect it will be at least two years before there's any impact on consumers. Why do I say that? I signed up for BlackBerry on Vodafone, 24 month contract, two weeks ago.