Not too many years from now, business-school textbooks will offer unflinching assessments of the fall from grace that characterised the decline of Nokia, which has bet the farm on a Windows Phone 7-based smartphone strategy that is working with critics but may or may not bear enough commercial fruit to put some heft under its flailing wings.

It’s amazing, really: once the undisputed king of the mobile, Nokia has been reduced to promising that its strategy to save itself will depend on its ability to develop different form factors. You know, so you can do completely different things than you can already do today.

Surely, a company that spends billions on R&D each year, as Nokia does, must realise that a statement like this can only go so far? New form factors are all well and great, but if you think you’re going to provide the kind of revenue uptick that Nokia needs with a smartphone you wear on your head or a wraparound tablet that doubles as a heart monitor, you’ve got another thing coming.

The only really new, significant form factor we’ve had in the past few years has been the iPad, which revolutionised tablet computing. Oh, wait a second: tablet PCs have been around since the late 1990s.

It must have been the smartphone, then – the touchscreen device brought to the mass market by Apple. You know, back in the early 1990s. Which it killed off because it wasn’t selling enough to support its flagging revenues.

For the head of Nokia to argue that newer, cooler devices will save its skin shows just how misguided the company has become. After years of getting whipped by Apple, Nokia still hasn’t figured out that it’s an engineering company that needs a content solution – and not just new devices – to save its hide.

History has now shown that the only thing that could help Nokia’s smartphones was to ditch its sagging Symbian operating system for something people actually liked to use. To complete the transition, Nokia will need to partner with some sort of content provider – the likes of Sony, or Bertelsmann if they want to stick with a fellow Eurozone firm – to build a compelling value proposition that consumers might actually care about.

Because the one thing Apple figured out a long time ago is simple: consumers buy devices for the sexy, but they stay for the content. Keep them happily immersed in more music, TV and movies than they can watch, and you’ve got them hooked.

Or, wait. Hold on, I’ve got it: haptic computing. Nokia will revolutionise the world by developing a smartphone that works without the use of hands, levitates alongside you wherever you are, and transcribes text messages by remotely reading your brainwave activity. It will drive your car, do your taxes, advise you how to dress for the weather, and look after your children.

Actually, the iPad is pretty good at that last one too. Back to the drawing board with you, Nokia.

Like the manufacture of sausages or the procreation of elephants, it is not worth considering the processes by which bring-your-own (BYO) computing came to be; suffice it to say that it is a very real, very problematic trend in today's enterprises. And it's a trend that should have any administrator worth her salt, scared to death.

There was always a good reason corporate IT departments frowned upon users bringing their own gadgets into the business. Laptops were virus laden, mobiles didn't connect properly, tablets didn't support enterprise security and authentication standards very well.

Yet these devices are invariably shiny, and executives in particular love shiny. Especially if theirs are shinier than those of the guy sitting next to them in the board meeting.

Through successive generations of iThing, this natural human curiosity with shiny playthings has turned the neatly controlled world of the IT administrator on its head. Prudent concern and measured technological control, complete with a limited risk surface enforced by restricting employees to one or two approved mobile devices, have given way to a free-for-all that has all but destroyed now-antiquated notions of device control. Executives want IT to manage their devices, but they won't cede a smidgeon of control over them.

IT executives fought the trend for a while, but the unending wave of shiny has proved overpowering and administrators are retreating to their inner citadels, having given up the ramparts as lost. It's the Bastille all over again – and, no matter how often you warn users to be careful, these days if you let too many mobile devices onto your network one of them is bound to ruin your whole week, faster than you can say 'Android malware'.

Proving that malware authors are clever little buggers indeed, the latest disasters from the world of malware are spreading via things as innocuous as text messages and Web pages, which are being tricked up to automatically load Android malware onto your phone or tablet as soon as you visit particular Web sites. It's like malware authors have become conscious of our busy schedules and tried to make it as convenient and easy as possible to catch a cyber-virus; think of it as the malware version of the PayPass swipe-to-pay service, where you barely have to pause before completing your transaction.

This stuff is scary in concept, because you no longer have to be a technological idiot to catch and distribute malware. And it must be absolutely terrifying for corporate IT managers that have already been struggling to keep up with the security changes that virtualised server environments produce. Now that mobiles can add new sources of attack to an otherwise secure corporate network and start probing sensitive servers within minutes, it's like the past two decades of information security almost didn't happen. They're going back to the drawing board to figure out how to stop the mobile free-for-all from undoing everything they've worked for.

Mobile computing was never meant to be a democracy, but it has ended up that way – and businesses are going to pay the price as the cult of shiny locks the cult of prudence in the closet, then throws away the key, wraps itself in the curtains and dances around the house with wild abandon and plenty of alcohol to lubricate the festivities. Pity the person who has to clean up in the morning.

Here's a great marketing idea when you're designing your next smartphone: pack in killer specs like 1080p recording, a sharp 4.3-inch screen and a sweet 12 megapixel camera – and then blow the whole thing by bundling a mobile operating system that was released 16 months ago and is way behind the feature curve.

Well, on paper at least: Google's Android v2.3 'Gingerbread' version bowed on 6 December 2010 while v2.3.7, on which Sony's new Xperia S phone is based, appeared in the last quarter of 2011. So, technically, the whole thing isn't 16 months old. However, given that a major new release of Android has been available for basically the same length of time, it's stunning that Sony would decide to base its new hero phone – and the first phone it has released since breaking from its Ericsson joint venture a little while back – on an outdated operating system.

The Xperia S has gotten good reviews, but on paper this specification seems like a point of weakness. After all: the other phone reviewers are drooling about this week, the HTC One X, managed to incorporate the new Android v4.0 'Ice Cream Sandwich' (ICS) – so why couldn't Sony? Putting them head to head shows operating-system versions to be a major point of difference.

If all this seems like a petty argument, that may be because it is. After all, the key to either of these phones is the experience they provide – and not some misplaced notion of technological currency or obsolescence. And Sony has of course done extensive customisation to the 2.3.7 release, and there's significant lead time in testing and so on, so it's to be expected that porting these additions to ICS will take a while.

Right?

It may make sense to you and me, but to the casual buyer I bet the notation that the Xperia S is running an older operating system than the One X won't go unnoticed. It would be like trying to sell someone a computer running Windows Vista – which is not a million miles removed from Windows 7, but definitely doesn't perform the same.

Will this automatically give a leg up to HTC? Not necessarily: Sony has significant muscle behind it, and a global network of partners who will be keen to promote the slick device no matter what it's running under the hood.

And yet this technological decision highlights what continues to be a major issue in the Android ecosystem – and, by extension, the mobile ecosystem in general. And that is, simply, that each new version changes things dramatically. Just as each new release of Firefox breaks third-party add-ons all over again (and makes me less and less inclined to stick with the platform out of what I admit has become blind faith) – and as each new release of Mac OS X seems to require small updates to your major applications – every time Android gets a new version it sends third parties packing to keep up.

This is not only discouraging for potential fans of the operating system, but it's making life difficult for companies that might otherwise want to allow Android devices onto the office network. Version proliferation is the bane of consistent management, yet Google's own figures show that the rapid evolution of Android has left many residual versions out there. The company is currently tracking eight different smartphone versions of Android plus three versions of the tablet-only 'Honeycomb' v3.x.

Fully 30% of phones in the market are running Android 2.2 'Froyo' or earlier, meaning they're running an OS that was – point-point upgrades aside – released in the first half of 2010. That's two years behind the smartphone curve, back at a time when the iPhone 3GS represented Apple's state-of-the-art.

Sure, Sony had its reasons for going back to the future – and I'm not sure if the OS version will impact its sales as much as its actual performance. But if we are to accept that ICS represents a baseline for the future, then shouldn't we also expect that it quickly becomes standard-issue in Android phones released this year? Anything less, and it's hard to take expectations to support BYO device strategies with anything resembling seriousness. Consistency will be king here, and Android will start earning its keep when it stops changing its outfit so often.

So, there I was, minding my own business with the laptop online using a mobile broadband service – but not doing anything online at that time. For whatever reason, I decided to have a glance at the download meter – and was stunned to see that my trusty Mac had downloaded over 225MB of data in the short time it had been connected.

On a landline connection, this would be little more than a hiccup. But on a mobile-broadband service with just 1GB of total capacity per month, it was a major chunk of my allowable usage – and it was, to the best of my knowledge, consumed because Mac OS X has a habit of downloading system update files as soon as they become available, so it can install them immediately when you tell it to.

This, of course, is less than ideal; I'd prefer that any system updates be done when I'm at home and there is plenty of Wi-Fi bandwidth and download quota to play with. But the laptop doesn't seem to care. And it's not the first time: on a few other occasions I have looked at the download meter to see it flying past 100MB, 200MB or even more.

You'd think this sort of thing would have been designed out of the OS long ago. While I think it's great that Mac OS X will download files in the background, when it's clogging up limited mobile bandwidth – and chewing through my monthly quota – something really needs to change.

It's the same sort of problem that drove me away from Windows in the first place: I can't remember how many times I would be working on a document, go to the kitchen to make a coffee, and come back to find that the auto-update feature had closed my documents (unsaved, of course) and the system rebooted itself. The desktop would be sitting there, smiling at me, totally uncaring that it had just negated hours of work.

I suspect this sort of issue will become more, not less, common as Windows 8 and the upcoming Mountain Lion (10.8) version of Mac OS X work to make desktop and mobile computing work more like the ubiquitous iPad, which has taken usability to levels previously unthinkable on a conventional computer.

Whether or not this is a good idea in general, remains to be seen: while I like the idea of having a desktop version of Messages that can communicate with other iDevices, for example, I don't need to have keyboard shortcuts disabled, as they have been in iPhoto, so that I may be forced to navigate once-familiar apps using a page-based system that is at its most comfortable in a touch motif.

The iPad, at least, has the whole updates thing down pat: plug in your system and it will auto-update via WiFi while you're asleep. That's one trick the Mac hasn't yet learned: from what I can tell, the Mac assumes it has a full online connection any time a check shows that it's connected to the Internet.

This is less than ideal: as devices become more mobile and the lines between tablet and laptop are increasingly blurred, software makers are going to have to become more aware of the usage models in which they are being utilised. And this is getting trickier: for example, forcing Mac OS X to only update itself via WiFi might be one solution – but it is now possible for a smartphone or tablet to set itself up as a WiFi hotspot that can be accessed by other devices.

Deciding whether and how to download updates based on connection type could make the laptop think it has a proper Internet connection when it is in fact connected to a quota-constrained mobile service.

I'd like to think the growing reliance on the Mac App Store – which, like its handheld-device counterpart, is update-aware – could change all this in the future. As software updating becomes an intrinsic function of the operating system, the morass of different updating systems could hopefully become a thing of the past. Updates will be easier, smoother, and smarter than ever before.

Yet all this magick is worth nothing if I lack the broadband quota to utilise it. Here's hoping Apple and Microsoft can get a bit smarter with the next versions of their operating systems so that mobile users don't need to be constantly checking to make sure the OS hasn't spoiled things for them by being too eager to help.

It’s hard work changing the world, and Apple has normally shouldered the burden well and effectively. But as its latest iPad launch struggles on the branding front, one can’t help but wonder whether the specifications of the third-generation product – just don’t call it 3G – show that an overeager Tim Cook is at risk of damaging the impeccable iPad brand by pandering to the crowds.

Remember that, for many years, one of Apple’s great conceits was that it would give customers the features it felt they needed – not the features that normal competitive pressures would presumably require it to offer.

When the world expected floppy drives, Steve Jobs said it didn’t need them.

When the world expected DVD drives, Steve Jobs said it could live without them.

Tim Cook wants to say 'yes' – but shouldn't be afraid to say 'no'. Picture by Valerie Marchive, CC BY-SA 3.0.

When the world expected Flash, Steve Jobs said it wasn’t really that great.

When the world expected Blu-ray, Steve Jobs offered iTunes instead.

In other words, Steve Jobs built Apple into the roaring success that it now is, by giving people what they needed rather than what they wanted. And yet when pundits and rumour mongers demanded 4G, Tim Cook happily acquiesced.

The thing about 4G is that, despite the enthusiasm, it’s still not mature enough to be a headline feature in a mass-market consumer product. Networks are sparse, coverage inconsistent, and the risk of an inconsistent (and therefore problematic) customer experience is very real. There may be better coverage in Apple's home country – the US – but Apple knows the global market is much bigger. And Apple, a company that values consistency of experience like few others, knows that 4G was always going to be a gamble at this early stage.

Australia's market hasn't helped: witness Telstra’s decision to roll out its LTE services in the 1800MHz band, simply because that’s the spectrum it has available. There may be provisions in the LTE standard to support 1800MHz deployments, but they’re not in use in Apple’s home market, and there’s no way on Earth that Apple would redesign a specific model of iPad just to work in Australia.

Ideally, Apple would have waited another year to release a 4G-capable iPad; given the fact that the devices are moving out the door as fast as Apple can get them made, I’m sure the company would have enjoyed strong ongoing sales.

Yet there are two major issues that pushed the company into an early 4G-capable iPad release.

The first is that Apple’s competitors are already offering 4G capabilities, which naturally makes technology pundits demand that Apple does the same.

Yet this is a false pressure: Apple has resisted perceived competitive pressures in the past to offer products that were seen by spec-watchers as being inadequate, and surprised the naysayers by selling shedloads anyway. Apple could easily have waited another year, silencing the inevitable critics by focusing on user experience and pointing out that 4G is still quite immature and doesn’t offer sufficient benefits to justify a product redesign around it. Heck, Apple has been doing this regarding Blu-ray for years.

The bigger problem is Tim Cook – and I don’t say this in a general sense, since I’m sure he is a nice guy and a competent executive. However, coming in as the second act to the world’s favourite CEO, Cook would have been feeling great pressure to deliver something memorable – and he did.

If the ACCC’s action succeeds and Apple is forced into uncomfortable contrition over the marketing of its current iPad in Australia, this otherwise excellent product may be remembered for all the wrong reasons. And Cook will have had to think, at least somewhere in the back of his mind, that 4G could have waited another generation.

Would you have waited another year for a 4G iPad that just worked with 4G?