Antony’s Mobile Blog

Do you store sensitive data on your phone, such as bank account, insurance number or even passwords? Personally, I do it. It is more convenient because I don’t want to carry all of my cards with me. Imagine if I have to carry all of my bank cards, credit cards, insurance cards, loyalty cards and identify cards.

Storing all the sensitive information on the phone is convenient on the one side. On the other side, it is very risky. What is going to happen if someone steals the phone? We often hear about identity theft these days, don’t we?

Handy Safe, an application from Epocware, is one of the available solutions to this problem. It allows us to store sensitive information on the phone in a secure way. It uses 448 bit Blowfish encryption to keep our data private and secure.

Handy Safe runs on most Symbian OS phones, including S60 2nd Edition, S60 3rd Edition, UIQ 2.x, UIQ 3.x as well as Nokia Communicator Series. It is available in English and major European languages.

You can store 35 types of information on Handy Safe, including credit card, bank account, calling card, driver’s license, password and even clothes sizes!! It uses a “master password” to encrypt your information. So, make sure that you choose a strong password.

The user interface of Handy Safe is intuitive and pretty easy to use. It categorizes our data into several folders, such as Personal and Business. We can even create our own folder, if needed.

There is one feature that I really like, which is synchronization to the PC. It means you can store all of your sensitive data to your PC too. There is a standalone application on the PC, called Handy Safe Desktop, which allows us to do that. You can use Bluetooth, USB or Infrared for synchronization.

There is one tip for you, use Handy Safe Desktop to enter all of your data on the PC. Don’t use Handy Safe on the phone to enter your data; unless you can type really fast using T9 keyboard.

This review is sponsored by ReviewMe.

Links

• Handy Safe for S60 2nd Edition
• Handy Safe for S60 3rd Edition
• Handy Safe for UIQ 2.x
• Handy Safe for UIQ 3.x
• Handy Safe for Nokia Communicator Series

Environmental issue seems to be keyword these days. We hear global warming, energy saving and many other terms almost everyday.

Yesterday, Nokia announced that they become the first phone makers to add energy saving alerts to their devices.

The alerts are one of a series of environmental initiatives that mobile manufacturers, led by Nokia, agreed to take action on this year. Nokia is the first of these manufacturers to implement the alerts into its products.

This is not the first action from Nokia to become a “greener” company. They have started a program last year, called Take-back and recycle, where we can send our unused phones to be recycled.

Nokia’s idea is to make it easier for consumers to act green by offering the possibility to return old, unused phones and accessories. Authorized Nokia Service Points, flagship stores, municipal collections, industry association’s collections, or retailers’ campaigns are all possible channels for returning used products.

 Many other big companies are serious about these environmental issues. Steve Jobs from Apple wrote an open letter about “A Greener Apple” last week.

And we plan to bring other environmental issues to the table as well, such as the energy efficiency of the products in our industry. We are also beginning to explore the overall carbon “footprint” of our products, and may have some interesting data and issues to share later this year.

As the end users as well as mobile developers, should we do something? Yes, for sure. We need to take actions to save our planet. It’s not for us, but for our children. There is a free booklet from Greenpeace, Your Personal Guide to Helping Save the Climate, which discusses some tips to save our lovely planet. Here are some of them:

• Buy the most energy-efficient products.
• Do your PC a favor and let it get some sleep.
• Don’t leave chargers and transformers plugged in. This is exactly the reason why Nokia adds energy saving alerts into their latest devices.

I will be away for a couple of weeks. I will have full access to Internet in the next two weeks. However after that, I will have very limited access to email since I will be on a vacation in Europe (honey moon, to be exactly).

My posting will be very sporadic in the next 2 weeks. After that, you can expect no posting at all.

See you in June…