Nokia security update and possible iPhone developments

Update for Nokia users: You are silent no more! The Curse of Silence that was troubling a long list of Nokia users with S60 handsets last month has an official Nokia fix. As you may recall, the Curse of Silence was a glitch that rendered Symbian S60 handsets unable to receive text messages due to an oversight in the way the OS handled incoming texts from senders with a name over 32 characters and an altered protocol identifier. While it had the potential to be incredibly annoying to affected users, a factory reset would typically take care of the problem. If you’ve been affected, Nokia has released an official (free) fix, silencing complaints until the next security snafu.

In iPhone rumors, the big news was all video: Adobe Flash and videoconferencing for iPhone are both said to be in the works. Shantanu Naraven, Adobe’s CEO, admitted that bringing Flash to the handset will be a “hard technical challenge” that Adobe and Apple will now be tackling together.

Declarations of teamwork aside, it would seem that the heavy lifting remains Adobe’s responsibility as Naraven also said that the “onus is on us to deliver.” Since Steve Jobs has been vocal about Adobe’s difficulties of in making Flash iPhone-friendly, it would seem a step in the right direction for both companies to join forces in order to restructure Flash specifically for the device. InformationWeek poured over Apple’s patents to reveal several interesting items that indicate the company is looking into (finally) putting video on the handset.

Several passages in the patent refer to a “digital video camera application” or “a videoconferencing application.” While this could just been Apple protecting its intellectual property, videoconferencing would be the next logical step for the device, one that could keep Apple at the top of the smartphone pile. Although people with jail-broken iPhones already have video capabilities, it is one of the features that has been conspicuously missing for the rest of us from Apple’s offspring (see also: copy/paste). In true Apple fashion, there are no dates set for either Flash or video, so for now we’ll have to content ourselves with the possibilities.