Apple just released a patch for the iOS (iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch versions) that fixes a gaping hole in mobile Safari that made jailbreaking the device as simple as visiting a web page. (I suggest if you have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch that you install that update immediately.) While some will report this patch as Apple “locking down” people who want to install their own hacks, it would be simply irresponsible for Apple not to plug that hole. What one site uses for a jailbreak, others with more malicious intentions could have used to steal credit card information, run up phone bills, spam contact lists—you name it.

We put our entire lives on our smart phones. It’s an intensely personal device. Which makes it all the more valuable to a thief, or in this case, a hacker. We as users are going to have to take steps to ensure that we protect ourselves as much as possible, which means paying careful attention to what we download, install, etc.

And, yes, I personally believe that Apple’s policy of secure signing ALL software on the iPhone is a bit safer in general than Google’s “install anything you want, even if it’s not from our store” philosophy. But that doesn’t mean iPhone users should be completely oblivious to the possibility of someone slipping something past Apple’s approval system. It’s nice to know that Apple could probably track down anyone who puts malware on the App store, and could not only remove the offending app from the store, but from everyone’s iPhone with the push of a button. But that’s a small consolation once your bank account has already been compromised.

I dread the day when installing virus protection becomes the norm on a mobile device. Most of the time virus scan software does little more than drain battery life and eat processor cycles and can only protect you from known quantities, anyway. I really hope we can avoid that sort of nonsense with better and better built-in security. In the meantime, we’ll all have to practice some common sense if we want to avoid getting hit by these kinds of attacks.

To date, Android has yet to demonstrate any ability to lure customers away from the iPhone. All of Android’s growth has been at the expense of Microsoft, Symbian, and RIM. The big recent quarter that everyone likes to talk about where Android “outsold the iPhone” was the quarter just BEFORE Apple released the iPhone 4, and even in that quarter, Android just BARELY outsold the iPhone, despite several new models on all four carriers being made available during that quarter.

The only two things holding Apple back from growing even faster than it already has is exclusivity to one carrier in many parts of the world and the inability to make the iPhone 4 fast enough. Once the manufacturing speed catches up to demand, and once we see the iPhone on other carriers (yes, even Verizon eventually), Android will hit the wall, in terms of how much faster it can grow. it will run out of easy prey and have to start making gains on merit.

Anyone can take a sale from Windows mobile at this point. That’s no reason to cook up delusions of grandeur.

Momentum is a good thing. But for the long term, killing the iPhone will be a lot harder than a lot of people think. With the iPad having no competition at all, more and more people are going to be investing in the iOS app garden. And once they’re in there, it’s not going to be easy to get them back out.

Alternately, you can think of it as a “small tablet”, in which case it’s more expensive than the cheapest iPad (unless you want to be roped into a two-year contract), with a much smaller screen and not nearly as much choice in high-quality applications.

Oh, and the 3G provider is AT&T.

Exactly who is going to buy this thing? What phone user wouldn’t rather have a Droid X on Verizon, and what tablet user wouldn’t rather have an iPad? Or better yet, a much cheaper iPod Touch?

Apple is going to have a very good holiday quarter this year. They literally have no competition for the iPad, despite all those devices that were demoed at CES BEFORE the iPad was even announced. They sent every other tech company back to the drawing board, and none of them has come up with anything yet.

It astounds me that Dell doesn’t realize that the current iPhone and iPad form factors were carefully chosen for a reason. Something in between like the Streak is good for neither tablet computing nor phone use.

And after all this work and research, expert QWERTY typists STILL couldn’t type as fast as I can on a software keyboard? What does that say for the 90% of us who aren’t experts? Can you imagine hunting and pecking on this thing?

At what point do we all just admit that Apple was right, that a physical keyboard on a mobile device is a relic, an old idea beyond which we’ve already moved?

And the biggest issue with this input method, of course, is that it’s completely unusable with one hand. If there’s one thing that Jeff Hawkins from Palm taught us years ago, it’s that any mobile that can’t be used at least in some capacity with a single hand is pretty much a failure. So there’s no way this keyboard would work on a phone of any kind. On a tablet, maybe. But not a phone.

The next big thing in text input will not be just a revamping of the old QWERTY keyboard. No one has figured it out yet, but there’s something much better out there. There has to be.