The PDA Usage Survey has found that PDA owners commonly download the entire contents of their personal and business lives onto their PDAs leaving the information unencrypted and without password protection.

PIN numbers passwords customer details bank accounts credit card and social security details are just some of the highly confidential and personal pieces of information people are storing unprotected on their PDAs.

One in four users are not bothering to protect their PDA with a password even though over a third are using it as a business tool to store confidential corporate information and access their corporate networks.

Pointsec Mobile Technologies together with Infosecurity Europe commissioned the survey into PDA usage to find out the top 10 most common functions of the PDA and how well users are protecting the information stored on them.

Mloop questioned 40 network operators about their handset buying habits. It says up to 80 million handsets worth $5.5 billion are either sitting in warehouses unsold or need to be supplied to networks that have under-ordered.

The report says that certain lines such as the Nokia 8310 do not depreciate in storage as much as other models such as the Ericsson T68. In general lower-priced handsets were found to hold their value longer than their more expensive counterparts.

Mloop predicts that worldwide handset demand could grow to 415 million by the year 2006. This is 125 million more phones than the 290 million expected to have been sold by the end of this year.

Most of this growth will come from Asia. The UK is expected to experience more growth in replacement handsets than for new connections. Worldwide half of all phones sold are replacement units.

By 2006 nearly 90 per cent of all phones sold will be replacements says Mloop.

High-value handsets have experienced an increased level of price volatility as a consequence of a higher level of competition said Mloop chief executive officer Byron Rose.

Orange comes in first for customer service in the contract and pay-monthly sector.

In the pre-pay sector Vodafones top place came with a score of 102 followed by Orange (101) and O2 and T-Mobile (98 each).

Orange has won the JD Power customer service rating several times over the past years.

The JD Power study is now in its fifth year. It looked at 40 different components in evaluating customer satisfaction.

The JD Power survey also noted that there is an increase in the percentage of new customers choosing contracts over pre-pay.

Among new users the number choosing to pay on a monthly basis increased from 12 per cent last year to 24 per cent so far this year.

The total share of pre-pay users has dropped to 65 per cent from 71 per cent in 2001 and contract users are up to 35 per cent from 29 per cent last year notes JD Power.

This move towards monthly payments should help to increase revenue for the phone companies because contract customers tend to make greater use of their service said JD Power director of European telecommunications Gunda Lapski.

The results of the survey indicate that nearly 63 per cent of contract customers use their mobiles more than 10 times a week compared with 24 per cent of pre-pay users.

The bottles sold by Vodafone for 4.99 and by Virgin for 5.99contain a glue-like substance within which floats tiny microdots the size of a pinhead and individually printed with a unique personal identification number (PIN) code.

The mobile phone owner paints the security dotting glue on each of the separate parts of their handset – phone battery and phone case. Then they register their PIN code with Alphadot.

If the phone is stolen and then recovered by the police the dots can be read by a special magnifying viewer.

The unmagnified security dots can be seen by the naked eye but thieves will not know if they have found and removed them all.

Alphadot is made by Alpha Scientific of the US which was formed in 1993 to develop a concept for the production of a low-cost microdot security system for component marking of vehicles and other property in the UK.

Person-to-person figures for April are up by one million on the previous month and confirm predictions of a steady growth in text messaging following the billion landmark figure first topped in August 2001 said the MDA.

Britons now send 44 million text messages each day across the four UK GSM network operators compared to only 30 million sent in April 2001. This takes the annual total so far to 5.2 billion against a 12-month MDA forecast of 16 billion for 2002.

A continued rise in UK text message usage is expected for May predict MDA experts as Jubilee Bank Holiday arrangements are made.

The handset manufacturer announced the deal at a mobile gaming roundtable meeting in London last week. The distribution deal sees Motorola join forces with content provider iFone.

Juan Montes Motorola vice-president of technology and content solutions for the personal communications sector says:

A lot of people remember Atari games and have a great fondness for them. The good thing about bringing classic games to mobile phones is that there wont be any loss of graphics or detail.

The defining characteristic of these games is their stickiness. People didnt love them for their great graphics but because they were so addictive. That is what you need in a phone game.

According to Montes the company is not going to set up a Club Motorola but instead will offer the games to other handset manufacturers.

Motorola senior content product manager Kenny Mathers adds:

To begin with games will be available on the Motorola handsets. This will give our handsets a differentiation. But later on games will be able to run across all handsets. Maybe different games will be available.

How consumers will buy games is still to be determined. According to Mathers games will either be installed completely in new handsets or will be partly installed and will be activated by calling a certain number.

He says: Another option is to sell games over the counter with dealers selling a boxed code or a scratchcard with a PIN number on it. The industry is moving forward. We would of course provide sales support to dealers including training and sales material. There would have to be a lot of education at retail level.

Mathers is confident that the first games will be available by September with two or three titles appearing a month after.

As reported in Mobile News (May 13) Algeria-born Kamel Rebbouth had been charged on four counts of dishonestly handling stolen Sim cards last November.

He had been further charged on four counts of dishonestly handling stolen mobile phones including a Samsung A300 a Nokia 8210 a Nokia 3210 and a Sony Z5.

Set for release in March the tri-band V200 follows the standard Samsung clamshell design with the camera lens positioned in the hinge.

The camera has a 100kb photo-storage capacity.

The new phone also boasts 40-bit polyphonic sound and a 65000 colour TFD screen and comes with one-touch GPRS access to the Internet.

A retail price has yet to be set by the manufacturer.

So says online mobile entertainment and information company WapOneline which carried out a survey into users habits.

The 100 users questioned said they regularly used their phone for entertainment mostly to send text messages to friends to alleviate the boredom of commuting or during quiet moments in the office.

Of these people 67 per cent said they would welcome text-based dating services.

They said a mobile phone offered privacy because it was easier to conceal than an internet service.

The potential for mobile dating is massive said WapOneline.

Of those not interested in SMS dating the research revealed that 46 per cent of people would welcome a service that would let them send romantic messages to people they had met.

Vodafone products offered include a range of Pay As You Talk phones and tariffs as well as pay-monthly consumer and data tariffs. Connections will be made through Vodafones in-house service provision while the operator will be providing full product and operational training to The Link staff in the stores participating in the trial.

A spokesperson for The Link says: We have been selling top-up vouchers for Vodafone since September 2001 so this is not a completely new partnership.

The mobile retail environment has changed and the requirements of the networks have changed. Everyone expects to see a rise in ARPU and this development is a reflection of that. By having the Vodafone range of products onboard The Link is able to offer a wider range of products to our customers.