10 mobile trends: Should you care?

10. Antivirus

Antivirus is a concern that's making its way from the desktop to the mobile device. But charges of over-hyping have been levelled and they have not been far wide of the mark to date - most mobile viruses require users to explicitly accept or download files to infect their phones. However, analyst house Gartner predicts viruses will move from chimera to genuine worry for CIOs as smart phone penetration begins to reach levels that will interest malware writers and hackers.

While antivirus on phones may yet be destined to remain a small area for some time - Juniper Research reckons just eight per cent of mobile phones will have antivirus installed by 2011 - as with many mobile services, the business market is likely to be the early adopter.

To date, mobile viruses have been largely toothless and required user action to execute the virus but analyst house Gartner predicts 2007 will see that situation change.

Ten mobile trends

1. FMC
2. Salesforce automation
3. VoIP
4. Payments
5. 3.5G - HSDPA
6. Location-based services
7. TV
8. Device management
9. M2M
10. Antivirus

Despite 'boy who cried wolf' fears over mobile viruses, CIOs should still direct their attention towards mobile viruses and their prevention. Gartner VP Nick Jones told silicon.com: "I wouldn't be surprised if we had a serious virus by the end of the year. CIOs have to ramp [antivirus] up their priority list."

For CIOs seriously considering antivirus, all mobile devices used within the company must be controlled by the company - foreign bodies such as iPods and personal phones shouldn't be connected to enterprise systems.

Jones told silicon.com: "Once you go down the road of anything like antivirus you probably need to integrate it with a wider system management strategy because you’ll need to push updates to devices, manage device configurations and so on. So antivirus is just one part of an integrated device management strategy. Ideally you’ll try to get some leverage by using the same vendors for mobile PC and mobile phone management, and increasingly this will be an option."

RATING: 3/5 - another one you should definitely be looking at.

Jo Best will be at the 3GSM show in Barcelona from 11 to 15 February covering these and other topics.