There’s No Place Like The Home Office

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

Working from home is one of those things that most people have longed for since time immemorial. Much like living on the moon, flying cars, household robots doing all the household or a catchy ringtone that won’t anyone every one else around you, working from home has always seemed so close, yet as unattainable as ever.

Thankfully, if your job involves sitting at a desk behind a computer wondering what you’re going to have for lunch, you can now do this at home thanks to the combined power of the internet and laptops.

Working from home can indeed be a liberating experience. Answering emails while scratching your unmentionables through your dressing gown is something everyone should try at least once, or possible twice, before they die. Without the constant interruption of phone calls and shrill, juvenile colleagues talking about the sodding X-Factor every five minutes, it is actually possible to get some work done. If you need a break, a repeat of Friends is bound to be on E4 or you can glance out of your window at the cute neighbour across the road hoovering their curtains.

Working from home effectively does require some preparation though. For example, if there are some crucial files on your work PC, then you have to ensure you have a copy either on a USB flash drive or on an online storage service – preferably both, considering how fallible technology is. If you need access to programs not installed on your laptop and access to email, ensure the VPN on your home laptop is properly configured and that your office webmail system works with your chosen browser and operating system (which, unbelievably, isn’t always guaranteed).

Even if you’ve overcome those technical hurdles, there is still one barrier to working from home effectively: yourself. Without the interruptions of phone calls, the occasional fire drill and that dolt of a colleague who likes playing repetitive techno YouTube videos on his work PC at full volume, the only excuse for not getting your work done is your own incompetence and child-like attention span.

It turns out that the average home is a smoldering cauldron of distractions. A quick catchup with the world of the Teletubbies quickly turns into a marathon Trisha-Doctors-Home and Away binge. Flirting with the cute neighbour next door suddenly becomes a full-on snog behind the rubbish bins. Heaven forbid a Jehovah’s Witness should turn up on your doorstep while you’re attempting to make that really tricky Nigella recipe for lunch. You might as well write off the whole afternoon as you engage in an ill-advised theological discussion over a dulce de leche ganache cake.

Clearly working from home isn’t for everyone. The sweet breeze of the office air conditioner has never felt so sweet.

Tablets: ready for business?

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

Every couple of years a bandwagon comes along that every technology company wants to jump on and take advantage of. In previous years, this has been netbooks and smartphones. This year it’s tablet computers, thanks to the popularity of the Apple iPad.

It was impossible to avoid tablets, or slates if you prefer, at this year’s IFA technology trade show and conference in Berlin. From high-profile manufacturers such as Samsung and Toshiba to lesser-known names such as ViewSonic and Hannspree, everyone seemed to be showing off a tablet running Android.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab Android tablet

Tablets are great for consumers who want to browse the web and check Facebook while lounging around on the sofa, but are they of any use for businesses? The increasing uptake of the iPad among businesses, at least anecdotally, suggests that they are. The lack of a built-in hardware keyboard, which is a disadvantage for some uses involving lots of text entry, has proven to be an advantage for other uses where the immediacy of directly interacting with content is more important. However, we have our doubts that tablets, especially Android tablets, will catch on with businesses beyond niche environments and early adopters without significant usability improvements.

The iPad currently supports features that we’d consider essential for businesses considering a portable computing device, such as configuration profiles, encryption and remote data wiping. Android 2.2 has finally added support for remote wiping, but Google needs to add and improve the others much more quickly if businesses are to seriously consider an Android tablet instead of an iPad or a traditional laptop, especially where security is a priority.

However, even when Google finally add these features to Android, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to take advantage of them on whatever Android tablet you’ve chosen to deploy. At least some of the upcoming Android tablets, including the Samsung Galaxy Tab which was the most promising of the ones we saw at IFA, will have their own customised interfaces.

If our experience with Android smartphones is any indication, this means Android OS updates will only be released for these tablets very slowly, if at all. This could prove to be a support nightmare if you choose to deploy more than one model of tablet from more than one manufacturer. Although businesses will be less concerned than individual consumers with updating to the latest OS as soon as possible, businesses should be in control of when they upgrade to the latest OS and not at the whim of manufacturers.

The popularity of the iPad is no doubt due in part to the vast number and type of available apps on the iTunes App Store, both those designed specifically for the iPad and those designed for the iPhone but which will also work on Apple’s tablet. No matter what kind of app you want, there are bound to be several apps available for the iPad that could fit the bill. A tablet is nothing more than a glorified keyboard-less laptop for web browsing and reading emails unless there’s a compelling selection of apps to use on it.

Although the selection of apps available on Android is continuously improving, there are still fewer Android apps than there are iPhone/iPad apps. We’ve also yet to see or hear of any particularly compelling types of apps that are available for Android but not available for the iPad (although we’d love to be proven wrong). There are numerous things Google could improve about the Android Market to boost the number and quality of available apps, such as improving the layout of the store and combating app piracy more pro-actively.

Surprisingly, Android developers can only charge for apps in the US, Japan and a select number of European countries. Increasing the number of countries where developers can sell apps is almost certainly the most fundamental improvement Google can make. Without a bigger market for their paid-for apps, Android developers are less likely to develop the quality apps businesses will demand.

Android tablet-enthusiasts would counter this by saying that HTML 5 apps will soon supersede native apps, but this has yet to happen. We’re not entirely convinced this will happen soon either since, as far as we know, none of the stock Android apps are HTML 5 apps. If Google isn’t confident enough to publish mission-critical HTML 5 apps, we doubt third parties are either. This could change once ChromeOS is released, but the recently announced Android tablets have yet to be released, never mind any hypothetical Chrome tablet.

In a way, Apple has had a headstart on the various Android tablet manufacturers since it’s already been making a mini-tablet for several years now – the iPod Touch. Although sold as a MP3 player, it’s also able to run almost all of the apps available for the iPhone and it’s cheaper than the combined cost of an iPhone and a mobile contract too.

The latest iPod Touch has almost all of the same features as the iPhone 4. It’s therefore not a second-best substitute for most uses unlike some of the cheap but poorly built and specified Android phones and tablets. These are often poor relations to the more expensive and better designed Android products, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab or the HTC Legend.

This may change soon though, as several consumer electronics manufacturers, such as Samsung, Philips and Archos, have finally announced their own Android-based MP3 players at IFA. If designed and priced sensibly, these could provide both budget-minded businesses and consumers with affordable mini-tablets.

None of this should suggest that the iPad is a perfect tablet. Until iOS 4.2 arrives in November, clunky third party apps are required to print documents from the iPad. Office document editing and compatibility is poor judging from the apps we’ve seen and networking with local file servers is non-existent. Plus, the iPad doesn’t have any USB ports or a user-accessible file system, so the task of copying files to a USB flash drive, which is trivial on a laptop, is impossible on an iPad. It’s an obviously essential feature, especially when access to the internet and online storage services is restricted or totally unavailable.

Despite its limitations, the iPad appears to be making inroads among businesses. Any competing tablets, Android, ChromeOS or otherwise, therefore not only have to be as good as the iPad but have to be better with features and a user experience superior to Apple’s. Judging from our hands-on experiences at IFA, the first batch of Android tablets and MP3 players aren’t quite there yet but they’re catching up fast.