14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that when it rains it pours when it comes to incidents involving stolen or lost mobiles phones that contain confidential data, since, lately, there have been a lot of cases where mobile devices have been used as a means to get access to private information that, once made public, could prove damaging to a lot of people.
This time around, the protagonist of such an experience is Telstra's CEO Sol Trujillo, who was given a mobile phone packed up with top-secret software, which got stolen by a pickpocket. Trujillo received the phone featuring the new-generation software this week in Barcelona, at the Mobile World Congress.
The stolen handset is believed to be an HTC device, either the Touch Pro2 or the Touch Diamond2, both of them unveiled this week at the MWC show, and that it was running under the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system. The incident embarrassed Telstra and Trujillo, and put Microsoft in a rather awkward position, as the company is facing an industrial espionage threat at the moment.
Yesterday, a Telstra spokesman confirmed the fact that Trujillo had received the handset, but also stated that the phone was in the possession of a senior Telstra executive when it was stolen. The device was expected to hit the US market in June, while the software was slated for release sometime at the end of the year. We should also note the fact that the software, unveiled at the mobile conference by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, seems to have been kept secret to such a degree that journalists weren't allowed to touch the new HTC phone.
"What if news of those bugs is released early before a final version goes on sale," said industrial espionage expert Les Goldsmith. He also stated that the incident might also affect Microsoft's shares. According to some voices over the Web, Trujillo was testing the software for any bugs. The application loaded on the stolen phone is able to offer users one-touch access to favorite songs from their music library, as well as to the latest mail messages or their favorite social networking applications. At the same time, the device had Internet Explorer 6 installed on it.