So far, there hasn't been one confirmed sighting of a mobile virus at all. There was a proof-of-concept virus made a couple years ago, just to show that AV for phones may be necessary, but so far there are no actual viruses or spyware for any phone operating system, especially the newest-on-the-block iPhone.

So don't fall for the scam. At the moment, that's all it is.

...it's one of those What if things. But so far, nothing serious. Also: Most smartphones enjoy backups on the PC or Mac, and I generally copy backup files to another drive every week, so worst case I'd lose a few days of update. All the same, if something insidious were to mail all of my contacts somewhere, or glom on to my text or email messages, that would suck and sting. My feeling is anti-virus and anti-malware protection ought to live as standard equipment on computers and devices, though I expect the makers and readers would beg to differ. Thanks for taking the time to comment. Joe

Because Opera Mini 3.1.2 MIDP 1 is unstable enough on most java phones. It causes mine to randomly reboot.

The reason the program can't run on the iPhone is that Apple won't let any programs run in the background. They could make a program that you could run on demand on the iPhone, but it's probably just as good to have the checks run when you're connected to a Mac (if you have a Mac of course). If Apple ever allows background apps to run on the iPhone, I'm sure there will be more than one antivirus.

While there are no real "viruses", there have been a number of vulnerabilities for the iPhone. After all, that's how the iPhone gets jailbroken; through a security hole.

Hey, kirkmc. Thanks for the comment. Actually that's no longer true - 2.0 does allow programs to run in the background and I'm running one right now, AIM, while my iPhone is "off" (asleep) and I can navigate away from AIM to mail, Safari, text messages and whatever else and AIM is still running and showing my screenname logged in on the iPhone as online and "away" here on my Mac on Adium. Thanks again for taking the time to comment! -Joe

I agree that all computers, smartphones included, should have anti-virus and anti-malware software installed standard. In fact, all operating systems should have it included right there with the defrag utilities et cetera.

However, what would be better than that would be if these big companies would just hire some malware consultants to try to hack their systems and close those holes they find. There's no real reason why these systems have to be so vulnerable, aside from the fact that they were released before they were fully tested.

I wish they would just take the extra time to seek out and patch these vulnerabilities prior to releasing them into the wild... I know it seems an impossibility, but they could sure be better than they are now.