HTC Touch

The HTC Touch takes the touch interface two steps forward and one step back, but you also get Windows Mobile 6 and the usual excellent Exchange integration for push email. If you want a slim and sleek touch-only Windows Mobile phone, this is it. If you want an iPhone killer, keep looking.

The Apple iPhone certainly isn't the first touch screen phone; Pocket PCs have had touch screens since before they turned into phones. But it is the first Windows-based phone designed for your fingers rather than a stylus, and it has a multi-touch screen that can deal with more than one finger at a time.

The marketing might be positioning the HTC Touch as the Windows Mobile equivalent of the iPhone, but what's really new about the Touch isn't the finger-friendly front screen - it's the fact that it's the first Windows Mobile 6 device to make it to the market.

It's also one of the sleekest Windows Mobile phones yet, with a soft-touch easy-grip matte black surface with metal trim. The case is just larger than the screen, so it fits neatly in your hand, leaving just enough space for the controls.

The Touch has more than the single iPhone button; a power button, a volume slider, a camera button, call and end buttons and a five-way controller for when you can't tap precisely enough. More buttons than you'd expect for a touch screen phone you're going to need them, because the Touch has a split personality. Slide your thumb up the screen and you get the TouchFLO interface; a sleek 3D cube that you can rotate by sliding your thumb across the screen, with panes for entertainment, launching programs and handling contacts. The music button on the entertainment pane takes you to the Audio Manager, a music player with menus and buttons designed to press with your thumb rather than touch with a stylus.

The program launcher has six buttons just the right size for your thumb; the photo thumbnails for your favourite contact are also thumb friendly, with links to the phone dialler, the phone log, the Contacts app and the tool for choosing which contacts you want here. The problem is, that's as far as the TouchFLO interface really goes; press any of those buttons and you're in a Windows Mobile app, designed for the stylus rather than the thumb.

You can scroll with your thumb in apps like Contacts and HTC has done a good job of optimising the touch screen so you can actually type with your thumb on the standard soft keyboard; get your thumb centred on the letter you want and that's what you get. But it's still a painstaking way to type and not as fast as T9 predictive text on a numeric keypad because the feedback is visual not tactile. And while you can usually get the selection you want on a menu first time sometimes you'll have to switch to the five-way controller or pull out the stylus. Windows Mobile is designed for the tip of a stylus, not your fingers.

The touch screen does make the many features in the camera interface more usable. You can adjust the white balance and the exposure compensation, zoom in (although not in the highest resolution) and switch between single shots, triple-exposure sports mode and video; it's the same camera interface as on other HTC models like the Dash but with a touch screen the controls become usable rather than frustrating. The camera itself is still average rather than impressive though, and the fixed focus means you can't take good shots of documents or business cards.

Windows Mobile 6 has welcome business features, including HTML email (with Exchange 2007 or Web mail), vastly improved email search, the ability to create meetings, flag messages for follow-up or create an out of office message plus a ribbon view showing conflicts in the calendar. IT admins will like the security policies for encrypting memory cards and forcing regular password changes. The Touch doesn't yet have support for Office 2007 file formats, although it does have the chart editing tools in Excel and other Office Mobile enhancements.

Apple MacBook Air

If you're of the belief that you don't have to be thin to be gorgeous, then the MacBook Air, will do nothing to help your case. It's super model good looking and, as Apple's marketing machine makes perfectly clear, it's the world's thinnest notebook, coming in at only 19.4mm at its thickest point, slimmer than most laptops at their thinnest. It looks, quite literally, cutting edge.

This uber svelteness, helps the MacBook weigh in at no more than 1.36Kg. I'll say at this point that this is a huge factor in the Air's appeal. The day before I got this review sample I had to take my standard issue work laptop home with me, and at 2.4Kg, it certainly made its presence felt. Doing the same journey the next day with the MacBook Air was a literal relief for my shoulder. It's so light you hardly notice it, and it doesn't cause your notebook bag to bulge.

However, to get to this, Apple has been forced to make several omissions. First of all, there is no integrated optical drive, which places it at a disadvantage to the likes of the SonyVaio SZ series, which manages to fit in an optical drive and at 1.24Kg actually weighs less than the Air.

Moving a step back, even the design of the packaging is a typically special Apple experience, and once you've freed it from its deliberately snug box, you'll find a thin slab of anodized with a surface that's completely smooth save for the white Apple logo in the middle. There's no clip to attach the lid to the base, it's all newfangled magnetic, and thanks to the smooth featureless surface I've even seen a couple of people try to open it the wrong way round.

Once you do manage to scythe it open you'll find that remarkable the lid is about the same thickness as the base, which when you think about the components that are packed in is quite amazing.

Naturally, the design abounds with stylish touches. When you close the lid MacOS X instantly goes into standby in a way that still seems to elude Windows. To indicate this you get a tiny glowing oblong along the front edge. Apple introduced its MagSafe power plug with the MacBooks and it's present again here, only with an even tinier connector. It's designed to come away easily so the notebook doesn't get wrenched, though sometimes it disconnects too easily.

Inside you'll find something that you won't find on most of the ultra portable's out there - a nearly full sized keyboard and a large 13.3in display. This is down to the simple fact that the MacBook Air might be thin and light, but it's not small. Its dimensions; 12.74in wide and 8.9in deep, give it enough scope to avoid cramped keys and having to squint at a small screen - no bad thing. It also means it nestles nicely on the lap, especially as it's not heavy. In that sense it's possibly the most appropriately named laptop computer ever.

Beneath the display is the fetching MacBookAir logo, while above this is a tiny iSight camera - Apple's name for its webcam and a small green light illuminates when it's active. Despite it size, it gave acceptable results in PhotoBooth and Skype.

Considering the need to keep the screen thin, there's no surprise that the display employs an LED backlight, and at maximum levels it's way too bright. However, once you tone it down a few notches it's perfectly usable with none of the patchiness that plagues some screens. The native resolution is a rather modest 1,280 x 800, merely the same as that on the smaller 11in display of the Sony TZ series.

The keyboard is essentially the same one you'll find on the regular MacBook. The keys have a fairly short amount of travel to them, and as long as you don't bash away it's a fine keyboard. Access to the F-keys is only via the Function key as by default they are mapped to shortcut functions, such as brightness, volume and iTunes control. One is also mapped to the excellent Expose, which lets you see all your open windows at once. One of these keys is mapped to the eject key, even though there is no integrated optical drive.

Apple iPhone vulnerable through Safari

A security vulnerability has been discovered in the Safari browser of the most recent version of the Apple iPhone software, according to security vendor Radware's research team.

A denial of service (DoS) problem occurs when an iPhone user opens a HTML page containing Javascript, which manifests the vulnerability. Users would be driven to the page by can social engineering such as spam mail or spam SMS.

Once this happens, the user will experience an application DoS which will crash the Safari browser and possibly the entire iPhone.

Radware said that the Safari browser was vulnerable due to a design flaw triggered by a series of memory allocation operations on the dynamic memory pool, which then triggers a bug in the garbage collector.

The flaw is currently unpatched, with Radware claiming users were vulnerable until an update is issued by Apple.

"While vendors are struggling to push new products and applications, it is evident that security still remains a secondary concern," said Itzik Kotler, security operation centre manager at Radware.

He added: "Hackers continue to misappropriate other people's software and their job is made easier by design flaws embedded into software products."

Before the iPhone was launched last year, IT PRO reported about how it could be a problem for IT departments as they try to incorporate the device into security and management policies.

Although legally dubious, the iPhone is capable of being hacked for use on different networks. Hackers could also be attracted by the fact that Apple now offers a third party developer kit.

IPHONE

IPHONE

The first solid info anyone heard about the iPhone was in December of 2004, when news started to trickle out that Apple had been working on a phone device with Motorola as its manufacturing partner. About ten months later, under the shadow of the best-selling iPod nano, that ballyhooed device debuted -- the ROKR E1 -- a bastard product that Apple never put any weight behind, and that Motorola was quick to forget. The relationship between Apple and Motorola soon dissolved, in turn feeding the tech rumor mill with visions of a "true iPhone" being built by Apple behind the scenes. After years of rumor and speculation, last January that device was finally announced at Macworld 2007 -- and here we are, just over six months later -- the iPhone, perhaps the most hyped consumer electronics device ever created, has finally landed. And this is the only review of it you're going to need.