Finally, another Android manufacturer steps up (though they don’t want you to know yet).
Motorola is sending out invitations for an event on September 15th that are deliberately mysterious; “Unfortunately, we are not able to give you any more details at present”, says the email; “however, over the coming weeks we will be able to reveal more”. Given that the invitation has the Android robot log on, it’s a fair bet that this will mark the UK announcement of the Motorola ‘Morrison’ and ‘Scholes’ Android phones. The rumours say both will have keyboards and large screens; Morrison looks like an old HTC design with rounded corners (or, say, a much thicker iPhone with a slide-out keyboard) , Scholes looks more like a Sony Experia, with bevelled edges. Rather more important than the case are what the phones will offer over HTC’s Android range, what Android means for Motorola - and what Motorola means for Android.

Back in the day, with the StarTAC, Motorola invented the mobile phone, then watched Nokia take the market away. The RAZR was the definitive feature phone, back in 2004. As Motorola needs more than one successful handset a decade to stay in business, they’ve tried every phone operating system - including going back to Symbian after abandoning it. None of them have turned into signature devices that sell like the iPhone and the BlackBerry and those billions of Nokia handsets (not to mention all the million-selling Windows Mobile devices HTC has come up with). The Android phones come out of a project that was rumoured to pit Android, Windows Mobile and a couple of other smartphone operating systems head to head; Android - or the hype around Android - won that battle. Just as HTC has said half of its handsets next year will be Android devices (a plan that’s unlikely to get the company any more photo opportunities with senior Microsoft staff), Motorola thinks Android will put it back on top. Er, only if the phones are any good.

Good, for an Android phone, has to include running all the Android apps that are on the market for the HTC devices. The Australian company that planned to make the second Android phone ever dropped the idea when it realised the smaller screen it planned would mean problems with apps that expected the same screen size as the G1. Windows Mobile developers and handset makers have dealt with this for years, with multiple screen sizes and resolutions and it’s rare to find software with a button hanging off the bottom of the screen; iPhone developers will have to cope with it if the rumoured Apple tablet really does run iPhone apps on a bigger screen. Windows developers can get a nasty shock when they look at their apps on a netbook and discover key buttons are hidden by the Windows taskbar because they just don’t fit on screen. Part of being a platform is making it easy for developers to put their code on every device and form factor that runs the OS. If the Motorola devices don’t have the same screen resolution as HTC Android phones, we’ll see how well Android enables multiple screen sizes. If they do, that only postpones the question; with so many handset manufacturers dabbling with Android, competing with HTC is going to mean trying different device sizes and styles rather than just making cosmetic changes.

Of course, Motorola isn’t only competing with HTC’s Android phones; leaving aside all the other smartphones on the market, there are still those Windows Mobile devices HTC dabbles in, like the Touch Pro2. I’ve been waiting for this since February and using it for the last few weeks - and it was well worth the wait. It’s got a big screen and a beautiful keyboard and intuitive, easy to use touch gestures (and yes, that is the first time I’ve ever been complimentary about TouchFLO).  It’s fast - I think faster than the 1GHz Toshiba TG01 for a lot of what you actually do on a phone. And it’s clever; you get the phone equivalent of Reply All to email - you can pick and choose multiple people and make your own conference call. You get the PIN for a dial-in conference call up on screen ready to type in. And when you turn the phone over, it turns into a speakerphone with really good speakers - and a mute button for when the cat throws up in the middle of your call and you don’t want anyone to know you’re working from home.  If the Motorola handsets have anything half as useful or innovative, they’ll be well worth a look.

And actually, we don’t need to wait until the 15th to find out what Motorola has on offer; the US event is five days earlier, so the main news will be the price and the operator for the UK.
-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

I hate VPNs. I’m not alone; the VPN that Microsoft – who ought to be able to get IT right - runs for internal staff is so slow (it takes four or five minutes to get connected) that many staff refuse to use it whenever possible, which makes it hard to patch their systems. And the less they connect, the longer the connection takes, because it’s busy forcing security updates on them and slowing down the connection even more. DirectAccess, a new feature in Windows 7,  could make that a thing of the past, creating a secure connection that’s more efficient than a VPN and much easier to use, so you can tell end users you’re making their life easier and get access to their machines for maintenance at the same time.

But the way DirectAccess makes the secure tunnel between the remote PC and your network to give them access to file shares and applications and everything else, is by using IPSec and IPv6. You need IPv6 on your internal network and on the network they’re connecting from – and that’s still rare. Luckily, there are ways around it.

One way is use the Forefront Unified Access Gateway; this does a lot more than DirectAccess, including enforcing application whitelisting on remotely connected systems, but it simplifies setting up DirectAccess. “We’re the plumbing,” says Scott Roberts of the Windows team; “sometimes what we give you is the 16-step guide to do something – and UAG is the friendly face on top. They have some really nice wizards.” UAG also helps you configure DirectAccess without needing an end-to-end IPv6 connection.

The roadmap for Forefront includes a version of UAG to run on the mid-market two-server system (codenamed Centro – it’s the step up from SBS), which will also support DirectAccess  DirectAccess isn’t going to be available on SBS, at least in the Windows 7 timescale, because it needs two servers, one of them with two network cards – so you can’t run it in a VM or behind a NAT firewall - and because Microsoft feels that the complexities of setting up DirectAccess are too much for small companies.

The other solutions involve encapsulating IPv6 packets inside IPv4. You can do it using the 6to4 and Teredo protocols, but not all networks support those; if you’re visiting a business that does outbound proxying for security, they won’t work. You can put in a protocol translation adapter on your network, or use a Windows Server 2008 R2 system running ISATAP to convert IPv6 into IPv4 to move the packets across your network. Or you can just use the new IP-HTTPS protocol which takes IPv6 into IPv4, just like an SSL VPN.

If you don’t want to put IPSec on your network, you can send the packets across your internal network in clear text; if you do have IPSec you can choose between integrity assurance and full encryption, but that does limit you to using DirectAccess to access resources on servers that support both IPSec and IPv6. That’s fine for Windows Server 2008 and for many Linux systems, but not Windows Server 2003. The DirectAccess server itself needs to be running Windows Server 2008 R2. All that means that DirectAccess while will make life a lot easier for your users, and give you a way of reaching out to touch PCs as soon as they go online rather than only when they’re forced to use a VPN – but it’s going to take a fair amount of setting up, and that may seem like too much work when it doesn’t work with any other versions of Windows than Windows 7.

-Mary

Wouldn’t you want a netbook that turned on as fast as a phone, but could still run all your Windows programs? Of course it wouldn’t do both at once, but I was half-hoping that one of the HTC announcements at Mobile World Congress last week would be an update of the Advantage or the Shift: a netbook that could dual-boot into Windows. It’s not just impatience; using 3G on a netbook eats into the already low battery life (at a good five hours using Wi-Fi, the battery life of the 6-cell HP Mini 2140 is exceptional). If I could do the Web browsing on the lower-power, better optimised mobile OS, I’d have more battery life left for my meeting later.
I-mate’s Legionnaire/Warrior combo comes close - a Windows Mobile touchscreen phone that slides into a netbook case that’s just the screen and keyboard and battery; the phone drives the screen through its XGA connector and uses the external keyboard. Oh, and works as a huge touchpad as well. The prototype we saw needs some work - CEO Jim Morrison promises the keyboard will be bigger and better - but slap Internet Explorer Mobile 6 or Skyfire (or the Fennec project mobile version of Firefox) on there and you can use Outlook Web Access and Google Docs or remote desktop into your PC. If a call comes in while the phone is driving the screen and keyboard, it automatically switches to speakerphone. And the fully-loaded Warrior ‘jacket’ includes four batteries that give you over 50 hours of use (and your phone comes out charged at the end).
But I do want the power of a local PC as well; I want to use Windows Live Photo Gallery to make panoramas and upload them to Flickr, I want to run OneNote (because without it I’d be a day early or three hours late for a lot more meetings), I want the Semagic client for my personal blog over at LiveJournal, and the ClipMate software that means I never copy something, forget to paste it and have to go look for it again. And OWA is great, but SpeedFiler doesn’t work in it and if I don’t file messages as I reply to them my inbox is a mess (OK, more of a mess than usual). (Oh, and I want to be able to use a 3G dongle, and printers and scanners and all the other peripherals; drivers are the curse of any OS.) My list isn’t going to be your list, but to my mind, the much higher returns for Linux netbooks mean that people want their PC apps as much as they mean that Linux isn’t ready as a mass market user interface.
Pre-boot environments are another option. The consumer version of the excellent Lenovo S10 has a Quick Start Linux environment (it’s the same Splashtop system that Asus has developed as ExpressGate); you can browse and IM and use Skype. But when you’re done, it takes as long to boot as ever. Phonenix’s HyperSpace is a lot more powerful: the Hybrid version carries on booting Windows in the background so you can have a little fun and then get straight to work. But the Hybrid version needs VT, which means a powerful notebook to start with (with Atom you get the Hyperspace Dual, which gives you much the same features but you have to boot Windows from scratch afterwards).
And while these pre-boot environments all cope with Wi-Fi, only HyperSpace supports a 3G dongle and so far only the Option model that AT&T sells in the US (did I say drivers are the curse of any OS?). A netbook that could dual boot into, say Windows Mobile, would come with built-in connectivity. But when I pounced on Peter Chou, the CEO of HTC, between the launch of the Touch Diamond2 and Pro2 (which will be my next phone) and  the launch of the Vodafone Magic (I think the magic was persuading Google it didn’t have to look like the Sidekick) he said that the technology wasn’t advanced enough yet - and probably neither is the market. But if netbooks continue to dominate, dropping the price a few pounds and painting them different colours isn’t going to be enough to make a new netbook standout. Putting a phone in there, on the other hand… maybe next year?
-Mary
 

 Says the man who never pays for his own phone. It’s very easy as technology commentators  to say that an open technology market is always best. We see new devices and services that we’d like to use and we think users will want too and then we see the mobile operators more as a barrier to get past than as an enabler, dictating what devices people can use, how they connect and what you can do with them.

A lot of that negative opinion is the networks’ own fault: the way to avoid becoming a big dumb bit-pipe is to offer smart services, not to try and control everything and lock users into the walled garden of your branded portal. But the fact is that the mobile network has to support everyone, not just the enthusiasts who are happy to pay for features. Without subsidised handsets, we’d have a lot less innovation because far fewer people would buy the latest and greatest phones.

The iPhone broke out of the enthusiast market to make mainstream users care about being able to put applications onto their phone. But when Mossberg interviewed Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and AT&T’s CEO Ralph de la Vega, the man who brought out the iPhone first, at the Mobile World Congress this week, Vega told Mossberg he doesn’t want apps to stay on the iPhone. Not unnaturally, because AT&T sells a lot of other phones, he wants cross-platform applications that use standard APIs (like the OMTP BONDI proposal) to access resources on the operator network “in a standard and secure way”.

It’s not that AT&T has got the open religion (it’s likely they’re one of the reasons you don’t get many VOIP clients or turn-by-turn navigation systems on the iPhone). It’s lucrative business accounts he cares about: “I came back from meeting our top customers and CIOs and what I’ve said is almost word for word. They told me they were tired of trying to get apps to work across BlackBerry and iPhone and Windows Mobile and other platforms.”Me too.

Given that we’re getting more and more operating systems and platforms rather than fewer (you can add Android and Palm Web OS to the list since the last time operators hinted that they’d like less work to do rather than more), Vega doesn’t cherish the pointless hope of a single application platform on all phones. He think that a lot of phone applications can be front ends to the Web - and a network is pretty happy if you can only use your applications if you’re using the data network (and before you say offline sync, remember the sync part of that means going back online later).

Steve Ballmer understands this (rather better than Mossbeg seemed to); he pointed out that “The Internet is at the back end of all these apps. It’s not like most of these are actually applications: most of these are really front ends to the web site and doing that is easier because the interoperability comes from the Web site itself, from Facebook or whatever.” Count the My Phone service in that camp; it only runs on Windows Mobile (sorry, Windows phones) and backs them up, but once your data is up there an app running on another phone could easily work with it.

My main complaint about My Phone isn’t that there are other sync services already (some cost money, some chew battery, some use a Flash UI on the Web site that hangs and while I don’t expect any of them to fail suddenly, one thing you can say about Microsoft is that it’s going to be around long enough to be a safe place to keep a backup). It’s that you’re limited to 200MB, when I can buy an 8GB microSD card for about a tenner. I went around calling Microsoft inexplicably mean for a while, until someone on the My Phone team said the limit was to keep the operators happy: another theme of this week was how many services are springing up to do bandwidth shaping and user data capping and having 5GB of backup streaming to my new phone could be enough for them to tell handset manufacturers to leave the client off their phones.

There are issues with apps that are just alternatives to firing up a browser (talking of which, if you’re using the Skyfire browser on Windows Mobile, get the updated version: I’m finding it faster and more stable). Certifying that those apps - and the sites behind them - are legal, decent, honest and truthful is an ongoing issue (because you’re going to holler to the operator if the to-do list site you found in their application store turns into an adult portal overnight), but the smarter operators are already thinking about how to keep tabs on that. You can’t yet submit a URL to O2 Litmus, but it’s on the cards.

Litmus is one of the smarter mobile developer programmes. It’s not just another app store (and I have my reservations about how many of those we actually need and from whom); it’s a way of turning enthusiastic O2 customers into beta testers. It’s O2 using what they know about their customers and their network to help developers create better apps. And that’s not very Soviet at all…

-Mary

I have triumphed in sleight of hand and prestidigitation: I discovered the easy way to get the back off a Treo Pro every time. Forget the wrist exercises and sheer force I suggested previously.

Place the Treo Pro face down on your left palm. Place the flat of your right hand on the back of the Treo Pro, with your fingertips sitting just above the top of the logo. Press down and in the same motion slide the case away from you, away from the connector at the base. It will slide off easily, and you can stop cursing.

Setting up a Treo Pro is a very smooth experience. No practicing the same silly cut and paste you’ve done a hundred times before (the Windows Mobile equivalent of ‘have you ever been to a Harvester before?’), no interrogation. Magically, it gets both the time and the time zone right -and then asks if you want to always get the time from the network if it’s available. You have to wait about 60 seconds while it configures itself and installs applications, and then reboot. But before you can do any of that, you have to get the back off to put your SIM in.

And you have to do it without resorting to a hammer or a nail file or anything else that will relieve your frustration but sully the shiny black plastic. The manual isn’t as much help as it might be, though it’s useful that it’s online. Palm puts in all its usual good ideas like a physical mute slider and a physical Wi-Fi button, but the back is baffling.

The instructions say put it face down and press with your right thumb in the bottom right corner. You do need to press here, but you also need to press on the other side and push as hard as you can on the base at the same time; eventually the back will give half a millimetre. Renew your efforts and keep pressing in the corners and shoving from the bottom. Finally the back will move a whole two millimetres and spring free entirely. You’re in!

UPDATE

Alternatively, I discovered just as I gave up and changed to the BlackBerry Storm, that there’s a much easier way. Place the Treo Pro face down on your left palm. Place the flat of your right hand on the back of the Treo Pro, with your fingertips sitting just above the top of the logo. Press down and in the same motion slide the case away from you, away from the connector at the base. It will slide off easily and you’ll wonder why it ever seemed impossible.

M

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

Or Windows 7, let’s hear it for the hardware; looking forward to WinHEC.

This is the only Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference before Windows 7 ships: unless the next WinHEC returns to its usual May timing that gives Microsoft another year to get it right. I’m expecting to hear positive things from the OEMs who’ve been playing with Windows 7 for much longer than we have; 7 is leaner than Vista and it literally puts devices ‘on stage’ with the Device Stage ‘experience’ (a task-oriented alternative to the AutoPlay dialog). And Ray Ozzie was very careful to frame Microsoft’s cloud play in a way that doesn’t ignore hardware.Google doesn’t give the hardware manufacturers much love, because it doesn’t have to, but for the first time since Paul Maritz left (and he’s now playing ‘who blinks first’ with server manufacturers at VMware over whether virtualisation will sell more servers rather than fewer in the long run) Microsoft has remembered how much the OEMs matter. The lack of drivers when Vista launched and the willingness to ship Linux on netbooks may have refreshed the Microsoft memory here.What’s good about the PC? Copy and paste, as I say whenever anyone asks me why I’m not packing an iPhone. And hardware. “Both Windows and the apps are sitting right next to the hardware, the processor, memory, graphics, and disk.” You can take advantage of a big screen in a browser app, but you’re wasting a lot of the power of the PC by not taking advantage of what Windows can do on the CPU. And storage is still much more efficient in the OS, as Ozzie notes there’s “immense value in the storage on PCs for confidentiality and mobility, for speed of access and local convenience for documents and rich media, photos, videos, music, and more”.