The problem it appears is in the way that Apple’s Mobile Safari handles Adobe PDF documents, as the browser is designed to automatically open such files, there are fears that a hacker could embed a malicious code in the file.

Apple say that the company is well aware of the reports and the threat involved and are currently investigating the problem.

Mobile experts have suggested that the only way of preventing Mobile Safari from automatically opening PDF files is by jailbreaking a phone and installing an application, called PDF Loading Warner, that then asks for permission every time the browser tries to open a PDF file.

Some have even suggested installing an alternative browser such as the much lauded Opera Mini, although no-one can be clear on whether this would solve the problem completely as they had not been checked for exploits.

It would appear that the only real option is to wait for Apple to offer a fix to the problem, although the iPhone company have been slow to respond with fixes to the mobile browser in the past.

It opens up the debate as to whether smartphones would benefit from having their own security or anti virus programme in place, many have argued that there is no need for such measures with the current OS that are being used.

Although I am not an expert on internet security we are warned on a daily basis of the vulnerability of our PCs to attacks and to this end there are numerous free antivirus downloads for computers.

While there are now some anti virus software developed for mobile devices, there does seem a split in opinion as to whether mobile users actually need such programmes.

It would be interesting to hear from anyone who has their own experiences on this subject.

The UK weather is notorious for its unpredictability so it is essential to include wet weather gear, wellies and umbrella when packing your tent and sleeping bag for a weekend of festival fun.

Not so long ago arming yourself with a mobile phone was considered a sensible and necessary precaution, enabling one to keep in touch with friends at the festival and in case of emergencies.

But these days smartphones are the norm and prior to leaving home it is advisable to load your mobile device with the latest mobile applications that will transform the phone into the ultimate festival survival kit.

Whether it’s ‘glamping’ (glamorous camping) or camping at V-Fest or Bestival, music lovers can transform their mobiles, choosing from hundreds of weird and wonderful apps that work on any mobile platform (such as Android, Blackberry, Symbian among others) and handsets – not just iPhones – and suit every festival-goers’ needs.

During those early mornings before the music starts, festival-goers can download apps to surf the web to catch up on last minute festival news, or check out the weather forecast to see if it’s a day to get out the high-factor sunscreen or the waterproof ponchos. When darkness arrives, avoid the risk of ending up in a random-strangers tent or falling down a rabbit hole, with an app that turns mobile phones into a handy torch.

GetJar, the world’s second largest mobile apps store next to Apple, has put together a top five list of the best festival apps, to keep party-goers smiling, come wind, rain or shine during this summer’s festivals:

1) MobileTorch – turns your mobile into a torch to help light the way back to your tent
2) ForecaWeather – check what the weather’s going to be like so you know whether to take the brolly or shades
3) Shazam – Identify that wicked festival tune by simply holding your phone towards the music and selecting ‘Tag Now’
4) Google Maps with Latitude – map where you are and find out where your friends are too
5) PhotoBucket – share your festival pictures, as they happen, with your mates

They can certainly target the younger market in some confidence. The vast percentage of those who embrace new technology tend to come from the younger age range, but there is also a vast market of older users who may have different needs.

They may not be interested that the latest phone can download music, run an app to tell them how to bake a goat’s cheese and lemon terrine or that they can now access the Internet while they are pruning their hedges at the bottom of the garden.

Many of these users, as strange as it may seem to many of the younger folk, would just like a mobile phone that is simple, easy to understand and performs the seemingly forgotten art of actually calling someone to speak to them. Fortunately, this is where a website like www.phones4u.co.uk is so beneficial.

This autumn, many new students will be heading into colleges and universities across the UK. Parents can give them a head start by taking a look at the fantastic ‘student saviour’ deals on offer on the website at present. These are the best mobile phone contract/laptop package deals and the value to be had is truly astonishing.

Take the popular Samsung Tocco Lite, a fantastic little mobile phone using touch screen technology. For just £30 a month with 02, you receive this great little handset on a 24-month contract but for that you get unlimited texts over the two-year period (which will be invaluable when little Jonny forgets the power of speech while at University and decides to communicate only via SMS!), 600 talk time minutes a month (which will no doubt keep him from running up a huge phone bill ordering Chinese takeaway).

A great deal, but it gets even better when you learn that he will also get completely free a fantastic Dell Inspiron 11Z laptop on which to do his vital University work, or more likely, spend the day on YouTube watching videos of skateboarders fall clumsily to the ground.

If you are a techno-lover then you will no doubt want the latest technology and Phones4u once again delivers. They offer the full range of fantastic new smartphone packages, including the superb new Samsung Wave S8500 and the astonishing Samsung Galaxy S.

They also offer a comprehensive range of Blackberry handsets, the stylish new offerings from the likes of HTC, Nokia, LG, Sony Ericsson and of course Apple.

Yes, fans of the iPhone 4 will be understandably feverish with the news that Phones4u have some of the best deals available on this latest Steve Jobs creation.

For instance, the stylish Apple iPhone 4 16GB is available under contract from Vodafone for 24 months. For that you receive 1GB a month mobile Internet browsing and 900 free minutes and 3000 texts messages a month.

All for just £40 a month and a one off initial payment of just £89. Alternatively, if you are going to be using your brand new iPhone 4 online a great deal, you could opt for Orange’s similar deal, which is exactly the same price, £89 initially and £40 a month, with the same number of texts and minutes free each month, but which comes with unlimited browsing and WiFi included!

If you aren’t an Apple fan, then don’t worry. There are still plenty of great contract phones on offer to you, at a vast range of prices and on a suitable tariff to match your budget. Many also come with a fantastic free gift to sweeten the deal further.

This gift is often delivered the same day as your phone, no needlessly sorting vouchers, having to send them off to some obscure address in the remote Orkneys and then waiting three months for delivery with Phones4u! If you order a phone with a free gift then, pending satisfactory credit checks, they should be with you the next day!

For instance, let’s imagine that a customer wants the stylish Blackberry Curve 8520. Once they have logged in, checked the specifications of the phone and read the all-important customer reviews of the phone on the site, they then decide that they want to order the phone.

The choices available to the customer are frankly astonishing. If he wants a cheaper monthly package, he can take the 18-month 02 woo contract, which offers a quality phone free of charge, for just £20 a month. Plus the customer would receive 100 call time minutes and 3000 texts free each month!

However, if the customer wants a little more then they will surely be delighted to find that they receive a lot more for their money! If they opt for the Blackberry Curve 8520 on the Vodafone Blackberry your plan Text £30 contract, for his £30 a month he would get 300 minutes of talk time and 3000 text messages. A great deal, but one made even better when you consider he would get delivered, free of charge usually within 24 hours, a brand new slimline 120GB Playstation 3!

A quick browse of the offers for your choice of phone will highlight the myriad of free gifts, from games consoles, televisions to laptops, cashback and iPods, all of which are offered alongside some of the best deals available anywhere in the UK.

Pay as you go customers are not left behind either. Whether you don’t want to be tied down to a monthly contract and want a stylish, modern feature-laden phone, such as the new Samsung Monte or Sony Ericsson W995, then they are available on fantastic, affordable pay as you go deals.

At the other end of the scale, if you just want an emergency back-up phone to keep in the car, or a phone so simple even your mildly eccentric granny could use it, then you can spend the princely sum of £2.95 to get a rather elegant Nokia 1661 – when you buy £10 airtime with Virgin to credit the account with.

With mobile broadband deals, laptop packages, special offers by the dozen, phone reviews and all the latest mobile technology news, the Phones4u website isn’t just about buying phones, but enhancing your life with them. Best of all, that applies if you are a techno-wizard who wants the most expensive gadget and gizmo money can buy, or whether you are of a more venerable age and want the simplest of phones to contact your family.

The name says Phones4u, but really they have phones, gifts, features and advice that is perfect for everybody.

Across the UK, thousands of people scan the pages of the press for the latest developments in smartphone technology, the new designs and the fantastic new apps that come with it. Those of you who invested in one of Samsung’s range of smartphones are unlikely to be disappointed.

First up, is the sleek and stylish Samsung Wave, which is also known as the Samsung S8500. What will impress you most of all is its daintiness. Considering this is a fully-fledged smartphone, the size is truly astonishing and fits snugly into a breast pocket or small handbag.

Not that you’d want to put it away that often! Given the superb clarity of its 3.3 in Super AMOLED screen, which offers unrivalled quality, even outdoors and in sunny conditions when screen glare is usually a problem.

With quality playback in HD and no motion blurring on video play, combined with a longer than standard battery life, the Wave is one of the best entry level smartphones available on the market today.

If you are looking for something a little special, however, then it is worth taking note of the Samsung i9000, or as it is more commonly known, the Samsung Galaxy. The impressive larger 4.0 in super AMOLED screen looks fantastic, and loses none of its luminescence even in strong sunlight.

The design is flawless, sleek, elegant and refined, yet sturdy enough to allow you to use the phone without worrying unduly about dropping it. The battery life is exceptional, given the amount of technical gizmos confined in the inner workings of the machine and the quality of the HD video playback has to be seen to be believed, especially when you link the phone to an HDTV using the phone as the remote control!

ThinkFree Office Mobile comes as standard, allowing you to work on the move, Samsung Around Me gives you access to real-time digital information wherever you are in the world, which is particularly handy if you are wondering what to do during a wet Sunday evening in the middle of Basingstoke!

The intelligent Turn-by-Turn navigation will soon have your car satellite navigation system boxed up and ready to be sold on eBay, while texting with the new Swype system is fantastically quick and surprisingly accurate.

In short, the Samsung i9000 does everything that all smartphones should. Only it does it a little better and a little quicker than most. The two genuine smartphones looked at here are both fine examples of what can be achieved with ingenuity, good design and intelligence. The Samsung Wave is a fantastic entry level smartphone with plenty to brag about, but the Samsung Galaxy is truly, as the name suggests, a stellar piece of technology.

The smaller, lighter version of the iPhone has excited Apple fans across the globe and many of those queueing to purchase the iPhone 4 in London had travelled from far and wide.

Apple have promised better mobile reception on the new device thanks to a stainless steel case that acts as the antenna. The new phone also includes a larger battery and improved display giving the device more talk time.

Also the camera has been updated for the new model, increasing to 5 megapixel in line with most top end mobile devices and including a flash for the first time.

One area where Apple may have to act swiftly is sorting out the latest OS system iOS4, as there has been much adverse internet dialogue from users having serious problems upgrading.

Supermarket chain Tesco are among the many outlets offering the iPhone from today, here is a copy of their tarriffs.

opera mini browser

To be honest, working on PCs all day every day of the week, I never gave much thought to browsing on a mobile device, happy to shut the door on computers along with the office door.

My Nokia mobile device has managed to keep me updated with urgent e mails allowing me to keep in touch with business and personal contacts alike and generally that has been more than I could hope for.

But the quick connectivity of the Nokia to the web via wi-fi has recently found me checking websites and such while relaxing in front of the tv or listening to music in the evening.

For someone like me who is used to working on a desk or lap top computer, I never imagined that the small mobile screen would be very pleasurable for much more than reading text and e mails.

However, I have found that watching music videos and film trailers on the small screen isn’t so bad after all and now the Nokia is getting much more use for browsing the web.

The software that comes with Nokia’s smartphones can be clumsy and slow, so when I saw the Opera Mini browser in the Ovi store I downloaded it straight away.

OK, it is not the latest offering from Opera, but having used the full blown version on my PC it is a product that I have found both stable and simple to use for web browsing, not to mention the fact that it is fast.

Opera Mini is free to download from Ovi and is installed on the smartphone within minutes, ready to browse. It has transformed my Nokia into a much more user friendly mobile computer, with software that I know and trust as well as being much faster than the original software.

The only problem for me is that I am now spending almost every waking hour with a computer in front of me, but the main thing is that Opera mini has made that a fun, rather than miserable, experience.

skype app from ovi store

Over the last few years the Skype application enabling voice calls over the internet has developed into a household name and a must have for most PC owners.

I was first introduced to the Skype service around five years ago while living abroad and at that time was sceptical of anything that claimed to offer a ‘free’ service.

Over time, and after using the service to make regular free calls to home my views on Skype changed and I found myself recommending the application to anyone that asked.

Of course running such software on a desk or lap top is one thing, but I had never even considered the service as an application for a mobile device.

Again I was sceptical, but this time not over the ‘free’ part of the service, but moreover how it would perform on my Nokia N97 mini.

Again there was no reason for concern. Having downloaded the Skype app from Nokia’s Ovi Store I was instantly requested to register or add my current log in details.

Connecting to my domestic wi-fi the application proved to be perfect and for the first time I was able to wander freely around the house conversing through the internet connection.

The mobile Skype experience via wi-fi is second to none, equal if not better than through the PC and highly recommended.

Skype for Nokia is specifically designed to work on the Symbian OS and is a complete package including instant messaging, video calls and everything else that you would expect from this brilliant software.

Having established themselves as market leaders with the invention of the year in 2007, Apple have invested much time and energy since in establishing their application store, where smartphone users can personalise their devices with free or paid apps.

With the latest devices from Nokia, particularly the N97 and its smaller N97 Mini version, the company have started to make inroads into the market that has been dominated by the iPhone.

The online Nokia app store is known as the Ovi store and offers free and paid apps to Nokia smart and feature phone users. The site has recently had a facelift making it more accessible and user friendly than its previous incarnation.

For users familiar with the Apple stores, the Nokia Ovi version currently looks a bit lean on content, but it is growing on a daily basis as more handset users choose the Nokia devices over Apple.

It is unfair to make a real comparison of the two app stores as Apple have long since held the advantage of operating their stores from back in the days of the iPod with iTunes, as well as having led the smartphone market with the introduction of the iPhone.

Content for the Ovi store continues to grow daily, but there are some massive opportunities for developers to make a name for themselves and Nokia welcome anyone wishing to distribute their product through Ovi to contact the publishers.

Some of the Ovi Store top apps include many free sports offering’s like football news and results service to the inevitable World Cup information provider, but one I missed last week was the T20 Cricket World Cup app which would have provided many happy moments with England winning the trophy!

Just browsing the site today, here are a couple of interesting new items, the WTF Net Slang Dictionary might be worth looking at, but particularly like the NATS Ash Cloud – Airspace updater, very relevant.

We will be looking at the Ovi store and its offerings in future posts, so please let us know your personal favourite apps games or audio/videos in the store.

The malicious game is called “3D Anti-Terrorist Action” and it is manufactured by Beijing Huike Technology in China.

After being downloaded, the malicious game installer can be identified by the file name antiterrorist3d.cab (we have also seen a variant of it called codeckpack.cab).

For further information on this latest threat to Smartphone users, visit the CA Internet Intelligence Security web site, who offer practical advice on how to remove the Trojan from infected devices.

NAVIGON MobileNavigator 7 North America

This application turns your smart phone into a navigation device that rivals dedicated navigation hardware. It offers such features as text to speech instructions, “go home” setting and route planning as well as 2-D/3-D map views.

Handy Weather for S60 7.0

This application provides continuously updated five day weather information for over 40,000 cities. Other features include maps, customised views and hourly forecasts.

TrackyPro (online Google Maps with GPS)

This is essentially an off-road navigation application. You can use it for such diverse purposes as hiking or mountain biking, skiing, driving or sailing. If you have ever driven your car in the woods, your built-in GPS navigation device in the car is not very useful since it depends on the existence of roads. You have access to a large compass as well as speed, altitude and slope devices. Whether you are driving or sailing or just hiking, you will have access to voice assisted navigation. Finally, you have access to online Google maps.

You should remember that not all of these applications work on all smart phones so you should check the compatibility which the particular smart phone that you are using. There are hundreds of applications available; go online and check out other applications that suit your personal requirements.

Furthermore, remember to travel smart and check out cheap flights so that you can make the most of your travel budget.