This photo shows Apple's iPhone 3G alongside two other new devices, the HP iPaq 914 and Nokia's E71. As the picture demonstrates, they are all approximately the same size, although varying in weight and thickness.

All three devices represent the latest technology, supporting 3G wireless broadband, Wi-Fi, and GPS capability for navigation and other location-based services. As such, these are all high-end devices and potential rivals for RIM's BlackBerry models in the enterprise.

Of the three, the Nokia E71 is the slimmest and the lightest, while the iPaq 914 is the heaviest and thickest at 154g and 16mm. However, it also appears to have the largest battery capacity, at 1940mAh.

The Nokia E71 has already been reviewed in depth by IT Week here. To sum up: it is a very capable business messaging handset, but its keyboard is somewhat cramped compared to a BlackBerry.

The same criticism can be levelled at the iPaq 914, but I found I could enter text fairly easily. The HP device also has one feature that might please BlackBerry users; a jog dial thumbwheel on the right side of the case, similar to that seen on older BlackBerry models before RIM introduced its 'Pearl' mini trackball. It also supports touch-screen input via a stylus as well as a standard five-way navigation control, giving users more input choice than most devices.

Apple's iPhone 3G has the best display and offers the best web experience through its Safari browser, but has two drawbacks as far as I'm concerned; no keyboard and a battery that cannot be removed by the user.

As with the first iPhone, the device is very simple to use, but I found Apple's on-screen 'soft' keyboard a pain - even compared with the tiny keys on the E71 and iPaq 914 - and kept finding myself hitting the wrong letter. The iPhone could prove a hit with business users that need a decent browser - such as for web-based applications - but I can't see heavy email users or anyone whose job entails entering a lot of data being happy with it.

All three models feature some form of assisted GPS (A-GPS) to speed up the time it takes to get a fix on the user's location. While the E71 has Nokia Maps, both the iPaq 914 and the iPhone use Google Maps. The iPhone version of this application is slicker, but both have pretty much the same functionality, including the option to fix your location GPS and get directions to a specified destination. However, Nokia Maps supports turn-by-turn directions for drivers, although it costs extra to have the directions spoken aloud.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on July 28, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) has been almost too successful. The defining moment was perhaps when Microsoft announced a free PDF export add-on for Office 2007, a feature OpenOffice has had for years. Now that both creating and viewing PDF documents is convenient and free, what market is there for Adobe's official authoring product, Acrobat 9?

Adobe's answer is to emphasise features that go beyond simply capturing the content and layout of a document in a portable format. Acrobat 9 introduces three key features: native Flash support lets you embed multimedia content without depending on external media players; portfolios let you create sophisticated multi-document presentations; and links to Acrobat.com, a hosted document management site, offer collaboration without the pain of email attachments.

I suffered a few glitches during my review. I tried to embed an MPEG 2 video, which is meant to convert it to Flash format, but although no error was reported the import failed. It worked fine when I converted the file to H.264 using an external editor. I also got a "no response from the server" error when trying to upload a large PDF to Acrobat.com, although this worked well with smaller files. The progress bar when uploading did not work properly for me; it goes to 100 per cent almost immediately, then states "Not responding" until the upload is done.

Using scanner features caused Acrobat 9 to crash, which is possibly a scanner driver issue but still unpleasant. Still, these are relatively minor grumbles. Once video was successfully embedded, the built-in player worked well, and if you need to distribute multimedia documents without relying on the web the new PDF format is a great option. Acrobat.com, now in beta, is already useful; and gathering responses from PDF forms is significantly easier in version 9.

Despite these benefits, for many users who simply need to convert documents to PDF, Acrobat is not an essential purchase. Further, Burton Group analyst Guy Creese believes that the format is out-of-step with the web. "The mental model of PDF (a paper
lookalike for documents) means that Adobe is not thinking of content as recombined snippets, which is what XML is starting to allow. XML, XQuery, publishing on the fly, wikis, are all driving companies to create dynamic documents rather than snapshots of documents," he told
me.

An annoyance for Mac users: the Extended Pro version, which includes video conversion, only works on Windows.

Author: Tim Anderson

Posted by Madeline Bennett on July 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Mini laptops have been a surprise hit over the last year or so, following the launch of the original Asus Eee PC. Other vendors have since brought out numerous models to try and emulate its success.

The latest to become available is the oddly named Wind from Micro Star International (MSI), a firm best known for its motherboards and 'bare bones' PC and server systems.

Despite the dubious name, it seems to be rather a well designed mini laptop, just slightly larger than the Asus Eee PC 900 and 901, thus making room for a keyboard that users can live with and a decent 10in screen.

It is based on Intel's 1.6GHz Atom processor and has 1GB RAM, and unlike the Eee PC it has an 80GB hard drive instead of Flash SSD storage. It also ships with Windows XP, although this is the Home edition rather than XP Professional.

While screens smaller than 12in are considered too small for business use by some experts, I found the Wind's 10in display with its 1024 x 600 resolution quite comfortable for productivity applications, and the system's keyboard is large enough for typing at a reasonable speed.

The evaluation unit I saw had Microsoft Office 2007 installed, and the Wind seemed to handle applications such as Word and Excel with little difficulty. It would thus seem to make a good mobile system for workers needing to access documents and their email while on the road.

However, the downside on all small systems like this is usually battery life. I didn't have enough time using the Wind to test this, but MSI rates it at up to three hours with the three-cell standard battery pack, and this is likely to be an optimistic figure. An optional six-cell unit will provide longer life, but this bumps up the weight from just over a kilogram to about 1.2kg.

The Wind has three USB ports, a slot for SD Card and Memory Stick Flash disks, VGA and Ethernet ports, and includes 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. It costs £329.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on July 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Should you care about Google Lively? The comparison with Linden Lab's Second Life is inevitable; but Lively is not (yet) a virtual world.

Google calls it "a 3D virtual experience", which is just about right, though you can forget high definition; this is more like being in your own cartoon.

Lively depends on a browser plug-in that is currently for Windows XP or Vista only, and lets you design virtual rooms from a catalogue of furniture. You can't create your own furniture in the current beta, but crucially you can embed YouTube videos or images from a Picasa web album, Google's answer to Flickr. You can also add hyperlinks to items of furniture. The next step is to create an avatar, jump into a room and interact with other users through chat or other expressions from laughing and waving, to kicking and punching.

If Lively has a killer feature, it is the ability to embed virtual rooms into other web pages, by copying and pasting a few lines of HTML. Now it is trivial to offer your users a virtual meeting space, or an engaging way to view a video.

Lively is not done yet. Rooms are slow to load, usability is only so-so, and important features are missing. It has potential though, especially if Google works out how to adapt it for business use. One idea is to link it with Google's other collaboration tools, so you could create a presentation in Google Docs, schedule it in Calendar, invite participants with Gmail and hold the meeting in Lively. It might just work.

That said, Google is currently pitching Lively squarely at consumers, and Linden Lab has a head start in an enterprise context. Earlier this year, I spoke to Gene Yoon, vice president of business affairs at Linden, who told me that, "You're going to see the client get integrated with high-end business collaboration tools." Another interesting development is the recent announcement by IBM and Linden Lab of successful porting of avatars between virtual worlds. It would be great to see standards-based virtual worlds, rather than the all-Google approach which seems to characterise Lively.

Author: Tim Anderson

Posted by Madeline Bennett on July 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)