It has been great using smartphones as de facto computers. You don’t have to buy antivirus software or worry about the devices going haywire every time some Ukrainian crime ring finds a new way to steal data from the cloud.

Which is why you could almost hear a sigh of exasperation from the geekier layers of the mobile industry late last month when they heard about hackers finding a way to break into iPhones and remotely control every aspect of the device.

It appears, however, that the worry-free ride will continue, at least in the near future, and not just because Apple quickly circulated a software patch to plug the vulnerability. Rather, for their extended peace of mind, users can credit the more tightly controlled — some would say strangulated — structure of the mobile phone industry in the United States. They can also credit some sheer dumb luck.

Such luck is familiar to users of Apple computers. The machines, though loved by those who buy them, have never caught on around the world. That lack of market share was a protection; virus writers can’t be bothered writing malicious code for so few targets.

The iPhone is in the same boat. As strange as it may sound in a country where so many people have these devices you would think they were given away in Cracker Jack boxes, iPhones worldwide barely register. Instead, it is Nokia mobile phones, running Symbian software, that reign supreme nearly everywhere except the United States.

So while thousands of law-abiding software developers are diligently building apps to clutter your iPhone or BlackBerry, the black hats taking aim at phones have already found their targets and they don’t include North America. At least not yet.

Just ask the people who are notorious for revving up consumers’ fears about computer security — namely, the makers of antivirus software. “The likelihood of getting hit by mobile malware is almost nonexistent,” said Mikko Hyppönen, the chief research officer at F-Secure, which writes software to detect and remove viruses from desktop and mobile devices.

The company, he said, has found and analyzed 490 mobile viruses in the last five years. In that same period, more than two million viruses were made for Windows computers. And those few mobile attacks were noteworthy for the fact that they were so, well, juvenile. They didn’t involve hacking for financial or personal data. “They’re done by hobbyists,” Hyppönen said. “Stupid attacks to leave funny displays.”

So even if a few hackers are focused on Nokias, users of such devices are not likely to be deeply affected. Hyppönen said the worry-free nature of the wireless world could well change, of course, since criminals could richly profit from successful mobile intrusions. If they break into a phone and direct it to make calls to toll lines like 900 numbers, that’s big money for the owners of those 900 numbers.

To do that, though, they would have to overcome another advantage mobile devices enjoy over desktop machines — the wireless carriers and device makers. While PC manufacturers have no control over what people put on their computers, that is generally not true for device makers and wireless carriers.

Most carriers do their own filtering for spam and content that could lead you to download malware before data reaches your phone via text messages. Meanwhile, mobile software shops — like the Research in Motion App World for BlackBerrys, the Apple App Store, the Nokia Ovi Store and the application stores of the various wireless operators — test and approve programs before selling them. (NYT)