Today’s CNN reports that President Barack Obama will supposedly get a secure smartphone that would be similar to his Blackberry. The Sectera Edge, made by General Dynamics, has already received a seal of approval from the National Security Agency. There is only one problem: either it’s not that smart or it’s not that secure. You can have either one, but you can’t have both. Smartphones are those phones that can provide some form of general purpose computing function. It is that function that is subject to abuse. While it is possible to develop and provide a general purpose computing function that is perhaps even provably secure, it will also be provably useless.
Another problem with the Sectera Edge is that it lacks the ecosystem that Mr. Obama may be used to with the Blackberry, or others might be used to with the iPhone. I imagine that very few applications have actually been written outside of GD. Looking at the iPhone, only a fraction of the apps for the iPhone are developed by Apple.