Android Phones Get Dual Accounts 109
holy_calamity writes "AT&T is adopting technology that gives a person with an Android device two user profiles, enabling company email and other data to reside in an encrypted partition separate from a user's apps, games and unfettered web browsing. AT&T is calling the feature Toggle, and plans to release it later this year. Toggle is a regular app that, once installed, creates its own encrypted desktop under the control of company IT bosses. Toggle is a rebranding of an app developed by startup Enterproid, which continues to develop its own version. AT&T think this move will encourage smartphone adoption in the enterprise. Interestingly, Apple's current version of iOS and app guidelines exclude multiple profiles on one device."
Why is stuff like this considered "innovative"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Smart phones today are, in terms of performance and architecture, not that much different from a notebook computer of a few years ago. Why are people surprised when smart phones today can do stuff that normal PCs could do decades ago, even when these PCs were a small fraction of the power and capability of today's smart phones? Why do so many people mistakenly consider stuff like this to be "innovation", when rather it's just a case of not intentionally limiting the device's capabilities?
Re:Tagging (Score:4, Insightful)
Because TFS mentions them in the last paragraph, and some folks only read the first and last sentence of a paragraph and make up the middle, not realizing that this story has nothing to do with the iPhone beyond mentionning that such a service would be against Apple's TOS.
RIM is in Danger (Score:5, Insightful)
This idea was discussed in a meeting with the various CxOs yesterday, where I work. While the recent Blackberry outage brought this to everyone's attention, the big kicker is people don't like carrying two phones.
In government, really only RIM has gone thru FIPS compliance testing and that is one of the big reasons they are so popular. Our CIO brought up that Apple has been taking the iPhone thru FIPS compliance testing and he was looking forward to being able to get an iPhone instead of the Blackberry.
That is until I pointed out the only way it'll pass compliance is if the iTunes Store is disabled and you can't load any apps on the phone. Did he want an iPhone with only the default Apple apps? "Uh, no." was the answer. And neither will anyone else.
Being able to have one phone is the key. This could be an interesting step in that direction.
Now Dual Networks (Score:5, Insightful)
What we really need is the 3G/4G/++ telco cartel broken so that my phone can have accounts on two networks simultaneously, so I'm not locked into a single failurepoint - that frequently fails. Just like LANs to the Internet, which can have dual WANs without prohibitive subscription rates.
In fact a second WWAN connection that's rarely used could cost more per bandwidth than the primary WWAN, so the telcos would each make a fatter profit off the "insurance" second WWAN.
So it's obvious that the telcos care more about their cartel and its power to do whatever it wants without consequences (universal warrantless wiretapping, anyone?) rather than actual increased profit and improved service for their customers.