I would hope they have some kind of system to remotely deny access. So if office bob looses his PDA the admins can quickly find out which PDA he had and turn it off so that it can't access the database

Listening to Duffy
Not duffying up the criminals

"You got me begging you for mercy 
why won't you release me "

I suppose you could say it's a Psion of the times...

Wait..
So we now have 10,000 handheld devices able to wirelessly access the police national database, command and control, and god knows what else, walking around the streets, sat in the back of policecars etc.

Now what happens when one of these widgets falls into the wrong hands?

£5k per device seems to be fair, coz i bet every device has GPS, WiFi, a micro and a high def vid cam in it, so they don't have to spend £50k per surveillance cam...

Great opportunity for croocks to steal some very useful handhelds and passwords!

£50m divided by 10,000 = £5,000 per handheld ! There are other costs not limited to the device like servers and infrastructure, but still £5k per device sounds a lot for a Pocket PC(?) with a mobile link.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7419676.stm