But is the Booklet a page turner? Intel and Nokia’s much-vaunted partnership to create a new generation of what Kai Öistämö, Nokia’s executive Vice President of devices  called “the next wave of mobile technology” powered by Maemo or Moblin mobile Linux and Intel chips must be a pretty long-term venture. We’ve heard nothing more about it since June and the first Intel-powered Nokia device is a Windows netbook, probably designed to compete with Qualcomm’s promised Smartbook Snapdragon devices (lighter, thinner netbooks that really will run Linux), and with Android and Chrome OS netbooks when they come along.

Is it the convergence of phone and netbook that Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (OPK for short) hinted at just a few days ago? The 12-hour battery life is good for a netbook (if you can get it without turning off the Wi-Fi and dimming the screen to illegibility); if you have to recharge a 3G phone every night, people complain. It does have 3G and GPS, so it will be interesting to see if the 12 hour battery life includes turning those on. Along with the HDMI output, that’s a similar spec to Qualcomm’s Smartbook, which also promises to be 2cm thick (and quite a bit lighter, at around 900g). Of course the Smartbook is an unproven concept, whereas cheap and cheerful netbooks are big sellers (though Nokia hasn’t put a price on the Booklet yet).

The Booklet name is probably just a play on being a smaller notebook without the ubiquitous netbook name rather than an attempt to evoke epaper and pre-empt whatever Apple might or might not one day launch as a tablet. Unless the Ovi apps that Nokia is promising take advantage of the power of the PC to do more than they could on a smartphone, it’s all a bit me-too.

Despite being just about the biggest phone manufacturer worldwide, Nokia has been struggling to match the success of the iPhone and the popularity of the App Store; according to the FT, it’s reminding employees of the new focus on apps and services by splashing the number of subscribers to Ovi services onto screens around its Espoo headquarters. And over in Silicon Valley, Henry Tirri, the head of the Nokia Research Center is looking at what kind of innovative services you can create using Nokia’s billions of existing handsets as sensors. Want to know if a road is jammed with traffic or a bar is full of people dancing or if the Starbucks you’re navigating to is probably closed? There are probably enough Nokia devices on the road, in the bar and in the coffee shop (during opening hours for comparison) for a smart service to tell you that the road is solid, the bar is jumping (60% chance it’s salsa dancing) and the Starbucks is dark.

That’s why Tirri sounds convincing when he pitches you a service Microsoft, Google, TomTom and dozens of other companies are working on: it’s about the phones. “Not deliberately but more by serendipity this has developed to be the electronic equipment that’s the closest and most personal, that’s with you most of the time; you really take care of it. This has evolved to be the device it is because of the first killer function, voice and communication. We are simply piggybacking on the fact that these are where people are and we can use them as context generators. We have the most of them on earth; a billion of them. By the law of large numbers we are simply in the best position of utilising context - like Google is on search.”

Context is whether the bar is busy or the shop is open - and it’s what makes services really useful. If there are 15 coffee shops ‘close’ to me, I want the one I can get to without getting stuck in traffic and I want the one that’s actually open, not the one that just says it should be open on its Web site. Is the user trying to VPN in from an Internet cafe already on the plane home? But it relies on those billions of phones acting as sensors and that means not getting in anyone’s way.

Tirri’s team has come up with a battery-friendly way of gathering location information that can generate context, without leaving GPS on all the time; virtual ‘trip lines’ that turn on the GPS sensor at a specific point (approximated from the cell location) to send an accurate position. This neatly avoids the worries of anonymising GPS data (In 2007, Microsoft Research was able to infer the home address of nearly every employee in an ‘anonymous’ location trial; researcher John Krumm only managed to find names for 5% of the employees using Live Search and he had to add false location information to really offer privacy to people offering ‘anonymous’ information about their travels).

If Ovi Maps on the Booklet starts to deliver context, it would be something really different. Until then, it sounds like just another shiny netbook.
-Mary

If you think about it, whatever platform they are, smartphones are a horrible combination of complex networking and primitive computing, squeezed into a pocket-sized security threat. I wouldn’t be without mine, but whatever smartphone I happen to be using I always wish it worked better; at the moment I’m using an HTC Touch Pro and I wish I could tell why it sometimes runs so slowly it can’t rotate the screen when I slide open the keyboard. I might have got an answer to why an app I was testing kept giving me a blank screen rather sooner if I’d been able to show the software developers what I was (or wasn’t) seeing on screen. The problem was that they’re in California - and that week we were in Las Vegas. Your users might not travel that far, but they’re far more likely to have problems on their phones when they’re not in the office.

Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager is a good start for managing smartphones; but it doesn’t have a remote control option, which is a lot faster when you would rather check a setting or make a change yourself rather than talk the user through how to do it - and wait for them to take the phone away from their ear to do each step of the process and then tell you what they’ve done. Odyssey showed off its Athena mobile management software at the Microsoft Management Summit last week, which plugs into SCMDM and adds remote control and monitoring of everything from memory and processor usage to which applications are actually running. (Or you can use it to add mobile management to System Center Configuration Manager.)

Suppose you want to roll out a new version of the Compact Framework to all your Windows Mobile devices (or a line of business app that needs a new version); you can’t install it on a phone that’s currently running an app that uses the framework (like Live Search) so you can choose between having the update fail or rebooting phones that don’t need it (and upsetting any users who had unsaved data in a badly-written application). Athena can check registry keys, tell you what apps are running - and close them, or just terminate the key DLL for the Compact Framework.

Athena also has a range of ‘feature packs’ that you can add in to get everything from details of phone calls (so you can complain to the mobile operator with proof if users complain they keep losing the connection halfway through an important call) to how many text messages users are actually sending (so you know whether you’re on the best value tariff for what users actually do). One customer tracked data connection problems for some users down to a handful of mobile phone towers; it turned out the operator had forgotten to update them when it did a network upgrade. Because the problem you’re trying to track will probably make it hard to retrieve data from the phone at the time, the Athena agent on the phones can collect data up to every 15 minutes, although it usually only sends data once a day to stop it tying up the data connection. 

The GPS pack tells you where a phone is - handy if a user doesn’t know if it’s lost, stolen or left in their desk drawer (and where it’s been - the historical data means at least you know where it was before it was taken inside and lost the satellites).

If you’re using Wi-Fi for a secure connection, Windows Mobile will happily switch to an open access point if it happens to be a stronger signal, taking the device off the corporate network - so users no longer have access to the resources they’ll be trying to use. One manufacturing customer had the rugged handsets workers were using in the warehouse randomly drop off the network; they set up an event in Athena to take a snapshot of the system when the network changed and send that to System Center Configuration Manager as an event System Center Operations Manager could trigger. Next time the handsets switched off the network, the reports came back with the SSID of the access point they were connecting to - revealing that one of the employees was hiding an access point under a desk so they could work in the break room (which suggests to me that the company needs either better network coverage or comfier desk chairs).

And before you say that iPhones don’t have all those problems, think about managing a device where you can’t run anything in the background - so your agent can only work when the user asks it to - and the only people who can retrieve a catalogue of what applications are on the device are Apple. Every smartphone platform has its problems; Athena can help on Windows Mobile (and the company is considering BlackBerry support next - handy as we’re going to be at RIM’s Wireless Enteprise Symposium).

You can get a copy of Athena packaged up in a VHD ready to try out from www.odysseysoftware.com (although you have to sign up for a sales email rather than just being able to download it). The price varies with what feature packs you want, but if mobile support is costing you a lot, Athena could be a bargain. Another customer had users shipping ‘broken’ devices to the support department, 90% of which turned out to have nothing wrong with them, which is a waste of time as well as postage. Giving the helpdesk Athena’s remote tools reduced the number of devices sent in by over 85% - and the percentage with no fault found went down to 5%. And instead of spending 40 minutes on the phone on the average support call, the support team were off the line with the problems fixed in around 8-10 minutes.

-Mary

Gamers seem to get it all.

Everywhere you went at CES this year, there were tools and toys for gamers.

They have the fastest, most powerful, best looking machines. Dell’s latest XPS Studio monster has all the looks of a classic US muscle car, while HP’s Firebird takes the F1R3FLY concept laptop and turns it into a sleek and powerful desktop PC. Then there are Logitech’s latest gaming keyboards, with a mass of programmable keys and tunable colours - as well as colour mini-displays.

It’s those programmable keys that make the G19 an ideal keyboard for an IT pro. There’s no reason why a gaming macro can’t actually be a stored snippet of PowerShell, or a set of keystrokes to quickly open up and log in to a remote desktop. There are twelve of what Logitech calls G-keys, and these can have three seperate macros attached to each key - so you can use them to store up to 36 different single keypresses or complex macros. There’s also a key to record new macros on-the-fly. Even the keyboard colour coding can be used to tell you if you’re writing code or managing systems.

If you’re happy with your existing keyboard (and I wouldn’t drop my ergonomic Wave for anything) you can still take advantage of macro keys using a gamer’s gameboard like the G13.

Gameboards are today’s take on the old plug-in numeric keypads. Like the G19 there are plenty of programmable keys, and a simple LCD display - as well as a thumb joystick. What might have been the key to a World of Warcraft session is also an ideal tool for someone working with Photoshop or a video editing application. You can take a tool like this and map in the key strokes and manipulations needed to quickly edit a podcast, or debug some code - or just scroll through and search your log files.

It’s easy to see just how gamer tools can be used by the IT pro. They can speed up tedious tasks, and can store commands you use often. The tricky bit is getting your boss to approve the purchase (and making sure you don’t use yours to thrash him in the office Unreal Tournament on a Friday night…).

–Simon

From CES 09 in Las Vegas

Thinking about a netbook as a last-minute stocking filler for yourself? There are some very usable netbooks now, especially the Dell Mini 9 and the new Lenovo. But they’re still cheap and cheerful personal machines with consumer features, and many of them look it.

In an ideal world, the ultraportable you want for business needs a few more features. A fingerprint sensor and Vista with BitLocker encryption would be a good start, along with a keyboard you can actually type full documents and emails on. A battery that lasts a full day saves you starting every meeting by looking for a power socket. Built-in 3G is more efficient, giving you better bandwidth and using less power than a USB dongle. And while looks aren’t everything, it doesn’t hurt to carry something stylish that marks you out as a success. Many of the netbooks on the market have basic looks to match their basic price and basic features. Customers and partners will want to take a look at a netbook and may be impressed by how much you can get done on it despite the limitations, but they can go away with the impression that you can’t afford anything better.
 
You certainly won’t give that impression with the unfeasibly light Toshiba R600 or the slim, sleek Sony TT. At the launch, the Chinese  artist commissioned to produce signature chops for the journalists at the launch kept saying. TT. Like the Audi? That’s not a bad impression to leave people with.
 
After Steven Sinofsky flashed a Lenovo S10 around on stage at the Windows 7 announcement at PDC, Mike Nash did a little repositioning of the Windows 7 netbook story, telling a story about visiting a big-box store where the 20-year-old assistant insisted that the only people buying netbooks were “really old people!” Really old people? How old? “Old! 40 or 45!”

Leaving aside the way anyone over 21 looks old from a certain angle - like the New Yorker map of the world, where anything outside Manhattan might as well be in Australia - and whether white plastic looks more like a child’s toy than black metal, the real question is what can you achieve on a cheap machine. Hardly anyone wants a PC just for Web browsing, especially now the iPhone and the BlackBerry Bold and even Windows Mobile with Skyfire (http://get.skyfire.com) mean you can see real Web pages on a phone. There’s the ‘familiar applications from Windows’/'any application that does something similar so Linux is fine’ debate. And there’s can I run the applications I want, fast enough to do something useful and with enough battery life to make it worth carrying a netbook with me. Three hours doesn’t cut it for me, I want to be able to run five Office applications and a Web development tool, and I want a fingerprint sensor and a TPM while I’m at it.

It’s like the HTC Advantage, which I still think of as the first Mobile Internet Device by Intel’s definition; as soon as the screen was big enough and the processor fast enough I wanted all my usual PC applications instead of the cut-down Windows Mobile equivalents. I prefer Office to Google Docs because I like features like document reviewing and AutoCorrect and colour conditional formatting to show values visually as well as numerically. And I’d rather have an ultraportable than a cheaper netbook, because it does more. It’s nice if it looks as good as the Sony TT, but the Toshiba Portégé R600 isn’t any prettier than a netbook; but it is the thinnest, lightest machine I’ve ever picked up, which also has a DVD drive. Just as Apple products are undeniably desirable on a visceral level, netbooks are a hard to resist combination of cheap and cute. But if they don’t do what you really need, they’re no bargain.

-Mary

Nuance is finally bringing out the version of Extended T9 that suggests features on your phone as well as words you’re trying to type. That’s only 20 months after I saw it at Mobile World Congress so you can colour me impatient, and today you can only download it for S60 devices and not Windows Mobile. Before the end of the year Nuance promises to announce a ’significant’ handset manufacturer and two operator deals for T9nav.

The way it works is that you just start typing, from the idle screen of the phone; if you type 258 you might be dialling a number that starts with 258, or you might be calling the Blue Note Cafe in Glastonbury, or you might be looking for ‘Blue Moon’ in your music library, or you might be trying to turn Bluetooth on. T9nav will give you a list of all those options and you can get things done with three or four clicks rather than navigating through menu after menu after menu after menu…

Michael Whers, the VP for evangelism at Nuance also showed me the voice control version, VSuite 3.x, which lets you say ’send a text to Chris Green’ plus a prototype dictation service that lets you dictate the text of the text, so to speak. The voice control runs on the handset, even on a basic feature phone, because there’s only so many commands you need to recognise; the dictation runs on a server in the cloud because you need a more powerful machine to recognise all the words you might want to use in a message. The real barrier to good voice recognition isn’t the phone - it’s the cheap headsets most people use which either have a cheap microphone or worse still, nose cancellation that just filters out the white noise and flattens the signal so much that voice recognition doesn’t work. Another prototype, Voice Search, lets you ask questions like ‘what hotels are there in Palo Alto, California’ and get not just a list of Web results but a list of Google Map links to the hotels.

Wehrs showed that running on an iPhone, although the app isn’t on the App Store for reasons he didn’t want to go into. He also pulled out another unreleased product; the HTC Star Trek flip phone running Windows Mobile Professional, with a Fake Cursor application to give you a mouse pointer so you can use the touch-screen interface without a touch screen on the device. As a dedicated Windows Mobile Standard user (you can have my HTC Excalibur when you pry it out of my hand and replace it with something in the same form factor that has 3G and GPS), I suspect this is a gimmick - the interface is designed for tapping with a stylus or a fingernail, but most of the applications I tried worked surprisingly well with the fake cursor. Don’t hold your breath though; it could be another 20 months before anything like this ships.
-Mary

Never heard of MWg? You’re not alone, but you might want to hunt down the Zinc II. For one thing, it’s cheaper than the HTC Touch Pro or TyTN II although it has much the same features. For another, it’s stylish and surprisingly sleek for a phone with a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

I’ve been swapping between the Zinc II, the TyTN II and my trusty HTC Excalibur (better known as the T-Mobile Dash) in an effort to fulfill my new year’s resolution about always having navigation with me. Google Maps does very well at location on some phones, but on my Excalibur it’s far from accurate so I’m looking for GPS. And while EDGE is OK for quick searches, I want 3G - mainly so I can use the phone as a modem with my laptop. I know built-in 3G is always better, to the tune of 25% better bandwidth, but not every laptop I use has it. I want Windows Mobile 6.1 for two things; threaded text messages and being able to search my email on Exchange Server from the phone inbox. I have a US Samsung BlackJack II which might be ideal - it’s the closest to the size of the Excalibur so far - but it’s very thoroughly locked to its US carrier.

The TyTN II is a great phone - and as the Stella from O2 it comes with CoPilot, which is my favourite GPS tool - but it’s just a bit too big and slab-like for me personally. Plus the tilt action is great for viewing the screen, but it covers the two action buttons on the keyboard. The Zinc II is a little bit lighter, a little bit smaller and a lot sleeker, with a soft-touch easy-grip rubberized coating and a flush screen - it’s a very comfortable handful even for those of us with smaller hands. It also has a faster processor, which means the camera doesn’t make you wait an age to take your snap and it doesn’t get bogged down with lots of apps running in the background.

That’s handy as with the TouchFLO-style Quick Menu launching from what I expected to be the Start button, I found it easier to launch a new app than get back to the one I’d been using. Swiping your finger across the screen to turn between the pages of buttons and tapping to open apps is a good way to work in Windows Mobile Professional; my nails work pretty well instead of a stylus but menus are still pretty tiny.

The BallmerBot joined Bill Gates on stage at his last public keynote here at TechEd 2008

No battery ever lasts long enough. The extended battery on the HP 2710 tablets

Motorola has backed down from two big challenges this week. The announcements about support for LTE signal that WiMAX isn’t going as well as the company hoped, although they’re good news for users because it means we’ll get more than one system capable of true wireless broadband speeds up to 100Mbps.

Realistically, the future is going to be a mix of multiple wireless standards: mobile operators with investments in 3G have always been going to move to LTE - that’s what the name means, long-term evolution of GPRS and 3G. They’re going to use high-speed wi-fi and WiMAX as part of the back haul along with anything else they can lay their hands on, down to home broadband connections with femtocells. Fast Internet connectivity is expensive. That’s why the dirty little secret of 3G is that there isn’t a single mobile cell anywhere in the UK with more than 1Mbps of backhaul, so whether your HSDPA phone is 3.6 or 7.2Mbps it’s going to crawl along as shared DSL speed.

Fixing that will mean using a mesh of different technologies and WiMAX is only part of it. Motorola has done pretty well out of its WiMAX investments and supporting LTE is logical - but given the investment Motorola put into Clearwire’s US WiMAX service, the company must have hoped for more from WiMAX alone.

And then there’s the handset division losing money and market share hand over fist, which took down CEO Ed Zander and could easily scupper his successor, former CTO Greg Brown as well. The problem is there’s no sign of a new phone to give the company another success like RAZR. The real problem is, that’s actually business as usual at Motorola.

The original eye-catching mobile phone was the StarTAC. I had the analogue and digital versions and loved both (bearing in mind that this was when you had to learn the primitive user interface and put up with it). With the analogue CELLect data card I did email at 2400bps, sitting on a train to London downloading email from CIX to my HP OmniBook (the one with the mouse on a stick).

The more you can see, the more you can do. I used to work in front of two 17″ monitors; the gap between the screens where the bezel interrupted the view just vanished from my vision and all I saw was a lot of Web pages, Word documents, spreadsheets and emails. A couple of years back, I damaged my ankle and couldn’t comfortably sit at a desk for several months and even when I could, I found I preferred working in a big recliner chair. A 17″ laptop was ideal but mostly I work on 12″ or 12.1″ widescreen notebooks - currently it’s an HP 2710p because it has such excellent battery life. My elderly Athlon had started crashing every 20 minutes with a hardware failure and besides, I didn’t want to go back to XP, so I put up with the smaller, single screen. Occasionally I’ve tried two laptops side by side - usually when I was reviewing one of them - but the switch from keyboard to keyboard is very disruptive.
I’d seen the DisplayLink technology before but it was seeing the wireless USB setup at CES this year that gave me the inspiration. If I could link my notebook to my two 17″ screens by wireless USB I could easily go back to twin screens without worrying about dealing with yet another cable. So we started juggling the office, to put my chair closer to Simon’s desk and with a flat surface where monitors could stand. This involved replacing a wall-mounted bookcase that would have tapped me on the head and I spent a happy Easter weekend decoupaging a pair of wooden Ikea drawers to put the monitors at comfortable eye height (they’d sat by an open window during one rainy summer and got very grimy).

Today we started hooking things up. Turns out two screens will really need some kind of wall-mount, hopefully on an extending bracket at an angle.I don’t have the wireless USB connection just yet so I’ll save DisplayLink for when I get the wall-mount and want two external screens and put up with a VGA cable for now. I’ve already used a strip of Velcro to mate the power and Ethernet cables so one more isn’t much more unwieldy.

For now, there’s one monitor perched on my right. This isn’t the same as screens side by side - but it’s ideal for parking a PowerPoint I plan to refer to or a Webex meeting I’m taking notes on. It came in very handy juggling hotel details and conference schedules for a trip, and then for having the details of last-minute cash ISA deals where I wouldn’t get distracted by them while I was on the phone talking about the next version of Windows Mobile. I can put my inbox over there and have messages and documents I’m writing in front of me.