The Register – www.theregister.co.uk – has run some pretty negative stories about the iPhone’s security or rather lack of it, and this has confirmed to the iPhone’s haters that it just a toy and not to be taken seriously. Also some of the article’s readers comments were that there was no way that any corporation would ever consider deploying iPhones to their staff as it just isn’t up to the job.

The thinking is that the iPhone is just too insecure compared to the Blackberry, which can be locked down and controlled by the corporations administrators. Obviously Apple will sort out the security problems soon but nevertheless I can’t see how the iPhone is ever going to fit as a deployed PDA, or whatever they call them these days, by any company as many users just couldn’t use it to its full potential. You’ll end up with some tech-savvy users getting the most of the functionality working whereas most of the rest just will not be able to work out how to do that stuff and will get frustrated.

Can you see any corporation being happy with their staff and their deployed iPhones where the users can install apps direct from the App Store over 3G and where they’re not controlled by the IT department? Don’t think so. And what about loading music from iTunes, downloading and syncing podcasts, watching junk on YouTube, loading photos – well you might get away with that, setting up and downloading personal email from their own ISP, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and lord knows who else. Then there’s downloaded TV programs and movies, and own ripped films with the barely legal AnyDVD and the ever so useful Handbrake. And the apps: GPS trackers, Facebook and Linkedin clients, one-click multi-login chat clients, internet radio clients, traffic web cams, blog readers, RSS clients, RDP clients. Not a chance.

Best give the users a level playing field with a much more basic phone like a Blackberry where they can’t fiddle too much and trash their iPhones or level the network and not be able to install anything.

And all this just to get office email when I’m at home or on holiday. Am I missing something here?

The iPhone apps have settled down quite well now, if you don’t mind the odd restore every couple of days. At least they are all working though the Beijing medal tracker app started to display trash this morning and the Koi Pond app won’t upgrade. In fact not only will it not upgrade, it won’t uninstall and the deleted then redownloaded version in iTunes isn’t interested in tidying up it’s sibling mess on the iPhone.

The way to sort that kind of problem is to restore the darn thing and that can take the best part of an hour and that’s before I’ve re-sync’d podcasts, music, photo’s and movies.

I got a book on C# which comes with a DVD with a cut down version of Visual Studio 2008. I installed it on Vista and when trying to start a project on it I got an error message “Requested registry access is not allowed”. Spent 10 minutes looking for an answer on Google and one of the suggestions said to create a registry key, which I did but it still didn’t work. I’ve got a feeling this may be a User Access Control problem and no doubt if I did a load of research I’d find out what the problem is. I can’t be bothered with all that O/S messing right now as for the first time in years I actually want to do some software development, well coding. I installed Visual Studio on XP but the last part of the installation resulted in the old Blue Screen Of Death, which I hadn’t seen for ages. Rebooted and Visual Studio had been installed ok.

I’ve created a couple of noddy hello world noddy things, one being a console app and the other a windows app. Later in the book it teaches you how to write WPF apps which I’m looking forward to.

I was reading the iPhones stories on www.theregister.co.uk which are always a bit of a hoot with some very choice opinions from that site.

What is even better reading are the comments to the anti-iPhone stories. I think they are a bit more positive towards the iPhone than they were 6 months ago but you still get at least one person frothing at the mouth lambasting the poor little critter. The negative comments tend to come from Nokia supports who consider the iPhone to be way behind their favoured phone. They could be right for all I know. Maybe we need a head count of how many people have switched from the iPhone to the (any) Nokia and vice versa. Stick that result up on the Register and you’ll see a war start.

Downloaded VNC Lite for the iPhone, another app that allows you to control your PC from the iPhone. I downloaded TightVNC, which is a server app for VNC Lite to connect to and that installed OK. Ran VNC Lite on the iPhone and waddayaknow, it worked fine.

I also downloaded the horribly named Palringo messaging service for the iPhone which can access the Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, ICQ, AIM, Jabber and Yahoo Messenger messnger services. This kind of app can be a pain to setup on the iPhone as there is so much text to enter. It would be good to have a proper keyboard for the iPhone when setting up stuff like this. I had a look at the Customer Reviews to see what was said about setting it up and as usual the reviews had entered into a war of words amongst some of the reviewers. The easy way to set Palringo up is to download the desktop client and create a Palringo account on the PC and then set up all the connections to Yahoo, Live Messenger and Google Talk there so that you don’t have to do that on the iPhone but instead just logon to Palringo on the iPhone.

The 3rd party apps are still getting jammed up within a few hours of use. There is also no content when clicking on the iPod icon. The iPhone software said there were no podcasts, music or movies. When I docked the iPhone, iTunes displayed everything that has been synced, so it is just the iPhone software that is horribly confused. Time for another restore and add the 3rd party apps back on one at a time to determine the culprit.