How secure is your smartphone? We may find out next month.

Hackers and computer security experts gathering on March 18 in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the third annual Pwn2Own contest will be targeting five smartphones: an Apple (AAPL) iPhone, a Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry and phones running on Google’s (GOOG) Android, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile and Nokia’s (NOK) Symbian operating systems.

The contest, sponsored by 3Com’s (COMS) TippingPoint computer security division, will award $10,000 prizes to anyone who can break into one of the phones and “pwn” it–hacker and Internet-gamer slang meaning to conquer or gain ownership. The smartphones themselves will be awarded as prizes to whomever cracks them first.

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Why should location-based social networks be worried about Google (GOOG)? Because its new Latitude product was able to gain over a million users in just a week, Google’s vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra told an audience at the Mobile World Congress today.

Latitude is Google’s service that uses your location to place you on a Google Map. If you have friends who are also using the service, you can see how close they are to you on your map and read their status updates. It’s a similar idea to what start-ups like Loopt and Pelago’s Whrrl do.

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This weekend in San Francisco, the second annual iPhoneDevCamp 2 is underway. Whereas the first confab focused primarily on Web applications, this one has a definite native application flavor, thanks in large part to the fact that the iPhone software development kit (SDK) is out of beta and now available for developers.

When the iPhone was released in June, many developers were disappointed by the absence of an SDK for writing third-party applications on day one.

At D5, Steve Jobs explained to Walt Mossberg that Apple (AAPL) first needed to iron out some security issues before they would open up the device to outside developers:

We would like to solve this problem and if you could just be a little more patient with us, we’ll do it.”

–Steve Jobs at D5 on the availability of an iPhone SDK

Fast-forward to the first quarter of 2008, when Apple made good on its promise by releasing an early version of the iPhone SDK. The fruits of the patient developers’ labor was evident at the launch of the iTunes App Store, where 500 free or commercial applications were available to download onto the new iPhone 3G or the original iPhones running iPhone OS 2.0.

No longer were iPhone users confined to using Web applications running in Mobile Safari or resorting to jailbreaking their devices to use third-party programs.

The App Store made it dead simple for every iPhone user to duel their friends with PhoneSaber or satisfy their Dance Dance Revolution/Guitar Hero/Rock Band craving with Tap Tap Revenge, a game which recently celebrated its one millionth download.

At iPhoneDevCamp this year, there’s a greater and more palpable sense of excitement in the air than last year, and it’s reminding me of the time when I was writing applications for another Apple handheld product: the Newton.

While the green device from Apple was not a commercial success–it was surpassed in sales and popularity by the less-capable, yet smaller and more convenient Palm Pilot–the Newton nevertheless pioneered many features we now see perfected in the iPhone.

Fourteen years ago, the Newton could fax, send email and receive pages; the iPhone is a communications powerhouse with 3G/EDGE/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth.

Newton’s handwriting recognition was dramatically improved with Newton OS 2.0 in 1995; the iPhone has fantastic Chinese and Japanese character recognition.

Finally, the Newton promised a day when users everywhere had their own personal digital assistants in their pockets; today, millions of people have chosen their phone to be an iPhone.

Despite leading the Newton protest at Apple Computer in 1998, I admit that Jobs was right to cancel the Newton. He made the correct decision to focus the company’s efforts on Mac OS, and it’s paid off.

The iPhone, after all, is running a version of the same operating system powering today’s Macs. The release of the initial iPhone raised the bar significantly for mobile users tired of using the same-old devices from Palm, Microsoft, and Symbian.

At iPhoneDevCamp 2, the bar is rising even higher for native third-party applications. If you were excited about the first 1,000 apps, wait till you see what comes out this weekend!

Below are photos from Friday’s welcome reception at iPhoneDevCamp 2. For more information, visit the iPhoneDevCamp 2 web site.

iPhoneDevCamp2 Friday Night Photos

Order these photos from SmugMug

Nokia, already a stakeholder in mobile OS maker Symbian, has announced that it will buy the remainder of the company and throw all the assets into a new platform called the Symbian Foundation, which will unite all the flavors of Symbian into a single, common software platform that will go open source in two years. The story is not that this happened but why–and what it means for the mobile industry.

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There are a couple of announcements Tuesday that point to a major technological battle: the race to become the platform for mobile applications. This is happening at two levels. There are mobile operating systems like Symbian, Windows Mobile, Apple’s mobile version of OS X and Google’s forthcoming Android. And there are environments that live above the operating system that are meant to allow applications to run on multiple operating systems. Sun’s Java is the leader in this area now. Adobe’s Flash Lite is a contender. Microsoft said Tuesday that it was developing a mobile version of Silverlight (its answer to Flash). And Google is creating a mobile version of Google Gears, its software that lets online applications work when they are not connected to the Internet. For these companies, there is potentially real money at stake. With 1 billion phones made each year, even a tiny licensing fee for software on each one can add up. And there is also money to be made selling development software as well.

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