Windows Phone ‘most secure’ smartphone platform – Microsoft


3 Jun 2011

Dave Northey, technology evangelist at Microsoft Ireland, believes Windows Phone is the “most secure” smartphone platform on the market.

Speaking to Siliconrepublic.com, Northey believes Microsoft has been “very shy” about promoting the security aspects of Windows Phone and believes the company needs to be more vocal about it.

“We keep applications away from the bones of the OS. When an application fires up, the OS will give it a dynamically allocated security bubble, for lack of a better word, and every app has its own one of those,” said Northey.

“No one application can talk to another and no one application can steal data from another application.

“So every application is completely secure, has its own isolated storage, can encrypt that storage if it likes to and as such, there’s no other smartphone on the market that’s as secure,” said Northey.

Northey highlighted there have been lots of “bad-news stories” about Android and iPhone in regards to applications “stealing data” from one another, which he said could not happen on Windows Phone.

Mango

Northey also spoke about the upcoming Mango update due out later this year, which will bring about 500 new features to Microsoft’s mobile OS.

Cloud computing is a major part of Microsoft’s overall IT strategy and Northey says new cloud features will appear in the Mango update.

“If you summarise what Microsoft are all about, we’re about three screens and the cloud. I’m at work on my PC; I’m at home on my Xbox, my browser or whatever I work on at home, or I’m somewhere in the middle. The third screen is my mobile device,” said Northey.

“Everything we do, certainly, is in the cloud. Windows Phone is already a good player there, it already has a lot of consumer-based cloud services and one of the big things that Mango will introduce is that it will work really nicely with Office 365,” said Northey.

While many of the new features have been focused on consumers, Northey said Mango will offer a lot to business users, as well.

“Initially, when Windows Phone was launched, it was positioned as a consumer device but it has an awful lot of enterprise features and Mango will introduce a few more. Soon we’re going to announce the enterprise features of the phone in the Mango time frame,” he said.