A chart posted on phone retailer Wirefly's site today may have given us the last real piece of the Xperia Play puzzle, the carrier. The chart was comparing the Xperia Play to the Apple iPhone, and under carrier, it listed the Play as being available only on Verizon. We expect Sony Ericsson to give us the details on the upcoming Mobile World Congress.

Mobile security concerns often center around high-power smartphones, but at the Chaos Computer Club Congress some German researchers demonstrated even feature phones are vulnerable. By setting up a small GSM test network in the lab, researchers were able to test various SMS messages with different malicious payloads. The results were startling.

The German researchers were able to find vulnerabilities in many feature phones from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and LG. The so-called "SMS of death" had different effects on each handset. Some were just disconnected from the GSM network, others were forced to reboot, but some (including models from Sony Ericsson and Nokia) were rebooted without registering the message as received. That means the network will continue sending the message, making the phone useless. The only way to fix this issue is to put the phone's SIM card in a non-susceptible phone. 

The researchers stressed that the same vulnerability probably exists in many phones, but they only tested a handful of popular models. If these exploits make it into the wild, unscrupulous individuals could send these messages en masse, forcing a mobile provider to pay up to stop the attack. Now that the details are known to manufacturers, future phones can avoid this problem, but existing feature phones rarely get firmware updates. Fixing current handsets might be a no-go.

Most of the tablet PCs we're likely to see in the coming months will be running on ARM-based CPUs. In fact, most mobile devices use these chips. The mobile CPUs from companies like Qualcomm and Samsung are often based on ARM designed cores. Intel has been looking to move their Atom low-power chips into phones and tablets, but hasn't had much success yet. According to the Financial Times, ARM is not being sheepish when it comes to talking about the competition. 

ARM CEO Warren East said of Intel's Atom chips in mobile devices, "Atom designs are just not good enough in terms of power consumption." Intel might be missing the boat because of this. Gartner is expecting 54 million tablet devices to be sold in 2011. Intel is not usually one to give up on a market, but time may be running out. Intel CEO Paul Otellini has previously said Intel will do whatever it takes to secure the mobile Market. We wish them luck; they're going to need it.