CELLPHONE giant Nokia is considering building antivirus software into its latest batch of multimedia smartphones, fearing that emerging breeds of phone viruses will block users’ access to thousands of paid-for music tracks or movies.
“Today, the threat from phone viruses is more theoretical than real,” says Kari Tuutti, a director of Nokia’s multimedia division, “but as phones become more like computers the threat may become more concrete.”
So Nokia has begun working with computer security firms F-Secure and Symantec in a bid to work out the best method of protecting its phones, including its first “iPod killer”. Nokia’s N91 phone, unveiled last week, has a 4-gigabyte hard drive which will hold up to 3000 tracks, three times as many as Apple Computer’s basic iPod mini machine. Despite having the same size hard drive, the gadgets use different encoding schemes for music files so track counts don’t match.
Advertisement
Tuutti says people who own such phones will “need to protect their digital content” from corruption by mobile malware. However, he concedes that vigilance on the part of the user, in rejecting files that arrive from untrusted sources, won’t be enough. So Nokia is considering supplying antivirus software free with the smartphone, though the user might need to buy further virus definition updates online so the phone could identify new malware. “We need a solution that’s both secure and low cost,” says Tuutti.
“Nokia’s ‘iPod killer’ will hold up to 3000 tracks, three times as many as Apple’s basic iPod mini machine”
They haven’t got long to make their minds up, as competition in the multimedia smartphone market is about to hot up: the disc-based N91 launches in the autumn at around the same time as Sony-Ericsson’s flash-memory-based “Walkman” phone, the W800, which will store 150 tracks on a 512-megabyte flash memory card (or 1000 tunes on a 2-gigabyte card bought separately).
The battle could boil down to a contest over battery life. Using hard drives boosts power consumption. The N91 lasts 5 hours with the phone, music and camera frequently used, says Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s head of multimedia. But using it for music only, users will get 12 hours play.
Rival Sony-Ericsson says the W800, based on flash memory, will offer 15 hours life if the phone is used as well as the player, but 30 hours if the phone is turned off.
