Use your personal smartphone for work email? Your company might take it

If you use your personal smartphone or tablet to read work email, your company may have to seize the device some day, and you may not get it back for months. Employees armed with a battery of smartphones and other gadgets they own are casually connecting to work email and other employer servers. It's a less-than-ideal security arrangement that technology pros call BYOD — bring your own device.

Now, lawyers are warning there's an unforeseen consequence of BYOD. If a company is involved in litigation — civil or criminal — personal cellphones that were used for work email or other company activity are liable to be confiscated and examined for evidence during discovery or investigation.

More here: Use your personal smartphone for work email? Your company might take it - Red Tape.

Bad news for Windows Phone Development

Market research firms, such as Gartner and IDC, publish estimates of global smartphone shipments on a quarterly basis. While these numbers are very helpful to determine who's currently on top of the smartphone market, there is one other metric that is just as important, if not more. Let's say you're an app developer. Of course you're interested in short term trends, because they give you an idea which platform has a future. But if you want to know if a platform is worth developing for NOW, what's at least as important is the installed base of that platform, i.e. the number of phones that are actually in use at a given point of time.

Former Nokia executive turned consultant Tomi Ahonen has recently published his estimates for the global smartphone market and the message is clear: if you're planning to develop apps for Windows Phone, you might want to think again. Why, Windows Phone has a global installed base of 14 million units. A number ridiculously small compared to Android's 427 million and Apple's 198 million. Even Bada, a low-end operating system pretty much left for dead by Samsung, has a larger installed base than Windows Phone does. So if Microsoft really wants to establish Windows Phone as the "third ecosystem" in the mobile game, the Redmond-based company has a rocky road ahead of it.

This chart shows the global installed base of smartphones at the end of Q2 2012, broken down by operating system.

Related articles

• Smartphone Market Shares Q2 Full Numbers - Samsung and Android solidifying their leads (communities-dominate.blogs.com)


• Global Mobile Smartphone Sales: Samsung Lead the Stats (txt4ever.wordpress.com)


• Windows Phone to surpass BlackBerry in install base (arstechnica.com)