To answer this question, requires a bit of knowledge on how apps work. Don’t worry, I’ll try and keep it as simple as possible. What a virus protection tool does is search for programs, scripts or other potentially malicious code that could affect the user. On desktop and laptop computers, these antivirus programs work very well.

So do they work on smartphones? Yes and no! In a program, you have something called source code. Consider this, the instruction manual that allows the program to run. Within this code, the app developer can program event handlers to mine the data from a user’s smartphone. Unfortunately, most virus scans for smartphones do not read this source code and thus an app could potentially be uploading your text, call and email history to the web, and yet the virus scan comes back negative.

The reason behind this is apps are not allowed to access the source code of other apps on most mobile systems, unless the mobile phone is hacked (jailbroken, rooted etc). Pandora and other apps have received enough criticism for mining user data and yet when these apps are installed on my phone and I run a virus scan, the scan still comes back negative.

Put in simple terms, what these apps claim to do, is not what they are allowed to do. It might claim to scan an app, but unfortunately, it is unable to determine if that app is data mining or not.

In the end, your privacy is up to you, or until mobile OS companies decide to take mobile security more seriously. Many popular apps have been known to send personal information including text message and call history to undocumented servers in China and certain Eastern European countries. If you want to protect yourself from this, your best bet is to research every app you download and check to make sure you know what permissions it claims it needs, that way you will have an idea which apps are accessing information and which are not.

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While all this is very impressive, the fact that their standard m.facebook.com mobile version (that is used by 50% of smartphone users counting Nokia devices only that is) sucks doesn’t help their cause. Apparently they have abandoned the development of their standard mobile product.

For starters, any friend that writes a wall post to a mutual friend appears on a friend’s timeline as a status update (i.e. without the recipient) of the aforementioned friend. This obviously can make things a little confusing. Also, Facebook  probably handles hordes of bandwidth every second on their standard web product and mobile products but somehow they are looking to cut corners with their light bandwidth standard mobile product. The Recent and News Feed displays around 20-40 of the latest updates which is a tad cheeseparing in my opinion.

While the above two points are the main factors behind my rant, they are major inconveniences that should have been addressed several weeks (or perhaps months?) ago, however I’m baffled that out of 50% of Facebook Mobile users that use the standard m.facebook.com version of the site, I am yet to find anyone complaining on the blogosphere or anywhere for that matter. Maybe it’s just me?

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The latest beta of Opera Mini nailed it in terms of interface and features, several improvements were implemented, including a completely re-designed interface, tabbed browsing, download manager, password manager and text selection making my Nokia E63 the ideal mobile device IMO, however key features like bookmark synchronization and RSS feeds existing in previous versions were somehow overlooked.

The bookmark synchronization feature was re-introduced in the second beta while RSS still wasn’t available. Personally, I tend to subscribe and keep track of blogs via mobile as readability is easier and the smaller screen size allows blocks of text to be read in ideal quantities for effective reading.

The lack of the RSS feature was a disappointment, I had resolved to installing both versions and used the previous version just for rss. I recently discovered that while the feature wasn’t available, the option to subscribe to feeds was still available. It then occurred to me that the feature was available in Opera Mini 5 as well however it was concealed as the developers have somehow failed to link to the feeds page.

Using Opera Mini 4, I retrieved the feed URL which is:

feed://list

I bookmarked it on my speed dial and it’s pretty much just like how it used to be on the previous version. I suspect an icon would be added in the next build and maybe even a complete revamp with the reader could be possibly implemented, till then, this solution works just fine.

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Mobitubia is a rich software client that lets you play Youtube and other FLV files on your S60 mobile phone. It features an excellent interface and apart from playing files stored in your phone’s memory or card you can directly watch Youtube videos from within the applications’ built in, user-friendly interface. You can search videos which are displayed along with the name, rating and duration and also view the ‘recently featured’ and ‘most popular’ videos on Youtube, virtually every feature that the Youtube site provides actually. (WARNING – watching videos online takes a lot of bandwidth!)

The application has been tested on Nokia N95 (classic and 8GB), N93, N82, E61, E61i, N75, E50, E51 and E65 only while it may function on other models as well. Looking at the list of supported models above it would generally function preferably on a high-end phone.

While the site does not look very convincing it does offer quite a bit of support with a forum, blog and a demo video of the application, and believe me the application is quite convincing if not for anything else!

You can also save clips directly from the Youtube website while watching them.

It does have a few limitations though, it only supports the Flash 7 format (normal Youtube format) and the video resolution cannot exceed 320*240 pixels. (Though I’ll have to add it does support other FLV formats and resolutions as well but the video jerks and gets distorted which is atleast something I think)

So what are you waiting for? Download the application from their home page. (Signed)

Other Applications

Mobitubia is a sufficient application and does its job perfectly for managing and playing youtube videos, however if for some reason you would prefer a different application or can’t use Mobitubia here are some other similar applications:

emTube

emTube is a similar application that offers virtually the same features that Mobitubia does, however i’ve used both applications and Mobitubia seems to be more stable in terms of playback and compatibility.

CorePlayer Mobile (shareware)

CorePlayer is virtually the best mobile media solution available today. Apart from FLV files, Coreaplayer supports a range of other popular formats like divx, xvid, mpeg, etc. however the product is shareware and costs $30. Apart from symbian v3 devices it also works on Palm and Windows mobile as well.

updated – December 16th 2008

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