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Using Microsoft's My Phone service
Microsoft's recently unveiled My Phone service for synchronising smartphone content with a web-based storage site is still officially in beta, but the company has allowed me access to test it out.
Generally, I'm quite pleased with the service, but there is definitely room for lots of improvement. As Microsoft is garnering feedback during the beta phase, it is quite possible that many issues will be ironed out before it is opened up for broader use.
As reported in the news here, My Phone lets you synchronise various types of content from your phone up to the web site. This includes contacts, calendar and task entries, but also text messages, documents, photos, videos and music.
Each of these categories can be selected individually by checking a box. You can also synchronise content from Flash storage cards.
Once your content has been backed up online, you can access it from a PC by logging into the My Phone web site, potentially making it much easier to get photos off your phone than mucking about with direct sync cables.
Synchronisation is also bi-directional, so you can upload a file to the web site from your PC, and it will be sent to your phone the next time you synchronise - handy for sending across Word documents and such for viewing while on the move later.
This should also allow you to re-load all the content you want if you get a new handset - providing it is also Windows Mobile - but I haven't tested this out.
On the downside, synchronisation seems to take a long time, not just on the first run when all your selected content gets uploaded, but also on subsequent runs when very little has changed. One synchronisation session took close to ten minutes, even when I switched to using the Wi-Fi interface of my handset instead of the cellular HSDPA connection.
You can continue to make calls and use your handset for other purposes while synchronisation takes place in the background, but if you lose the wireless signal for any reason, My Phone simply stops and does not appear to retry without manual intervention.
You can set synchronisation to happen on a daily or weekly schedule, or keep it on manual. Unless you have a generous bandwidth allowance from your mobile operator, manual synchronisation is generally recommended.
I would also like to see more fine-grained selection of content to synchronise. For example, all my photos are stored on a Micro SD Flash card, but I can't set My Phone to synchronise photos only from there. This means that the entire set of sample images that came pre-loaded on the handset also got synchronised up to the web site, even though I don't want these.
Another drawback is that when you choose to synchronise contacts, My Phone only includes names from the Outlook contact list and not any of those stored on the phone SIM itself. This means you are likely to lose some contacts if your phone should go missing, unless you use another method of backing these up.
Access to the online content from a PC browser is also fairly basic at present. For example, while you can view a slide show of all uploaded photos, there is no facility to rotate images you might have captured by rotating the handset sideways to get a landscape shot. There does not seem to be a way to select more than one image at a time to download to your PC, either, which makes this a laborious process.
However, I should point out the My Phone is still in beta, and is not expected to be broadly available until early Q4 2009, according to Microsoft, so much could change between now and then.
My Phone will eventually come pre-installed in Windows Mobile 6.5, but users with Windows Mobile 6 or 6.1 handsets can download and install it. I am currently trying it out on an HTC S730 handset, which is based on Windows Mobile 6.
The client itself is a 560kB download and unpacks several files, one of which is a runtime of just over 700kB in size. Microsoft recently pushed out an updated version, which was a download of exactly the same size.
You need a Windows Live ID in order to login to use My Phone. If you have a Hotmail account, then this is your email address.
China in your hand
Perhaps you've got better things to do over the festive season, but if you want to be dragged back to the demise of the British motorcycle industry, you've just hit paydirt.
On the face of it Motorbikes and IT have very little in common. However, if you look back to the 1960's maybe there is a trend which could be worrying for the US software industry.
Has the US software industry got overconfident? Will we all be computing in the clouds 5-10-20 years down the line? Are discrete software and hardware packages deader than the dodo?
Recently I've reviewed a couple of software packages from Chinese companies - server partition management from Easeus and an enterprise network protocol analysis package called Capsa from Colasoft. Both were efficient, neat and did exactly what they said on the tin. In fact PowerQuest's server partition manager software, acquired by Symantec stopped at version 8.0 and was never upgraded to support Microsoft's newer server operating systems. So spotting a gap in the market, is maybe the first step to global domination..
A gap in the market was precisely what did for the UK's motorcycle industry, as the Japanese started off producing small commuter-type machines which were cheap, and more reliable. The UK's manufacturers never thought the Japanese would be able to produce a bike aimed directly at their own market. As such, the Honda CB750 must have been quite a shock and the death of motorcycle manufacturing in the UK followed pretty swiftly.
The Chinese appear to be doing the same with software packages, and you can bet the US software giants probably don't consider China's software industry as capable of coming out with software's equivalent of the CB750. Chinese telecoms firm Huawei, seem to be doing OK. Could the same happen in the software market? Time will tell.
Of course, it could be that all the festive drink has befuddled my brain, and my perception of things to come may be way off the mark - but stranger things have happened.
Happy New Year
Testing LogMeIn's new service
I've been trying out the beta version of LogMein's updated remote control service, which is due to go live at the end of this month. It adds a number of new features that make life easier when accessing a computer remotely.
LogMeIn's service is useful if you need to access your computer remotely, whether to fetch some documents you need or to use an application that you wouldn't otherwise have access to.
I've found the service extremely useful when working from home. Our company email system uses Lotus Notes, and web-based access to this is rather primitive and unsatisfactory. Rather than install Notes on my home PC, it's easier to remotely view the screen of my office computer instead.
The new LogMeIn version makes the controls clear and easier to find than before. You can go into a remote control session or open the file transfer window at any time by clicking a single button. When in a remote control session, a pop-up control panel lets you flick between the browser view and full screen mode, and select various other options.
New features include support for drag and drop file transfer. If I've written an article at home, this lets me copy the document file to my office PC as easily as you would move a document between folders on the same computer.
However, LogMeIn also seems to have improved the performance of the remote control viewer itself. A year or two back, most remote control tools suffered to a greater or lesser degree from network latency, meaning that when you moved the mouse, the pointer on the remote screen took a fraction of a second to follow.
Using the new LogMeIn, I didn't experience any of this. When in full-screen mode, I found it easy to believe that the Windows desktop I was using belonged to my home PC in front of me, and not the remote office system. However, there is a floating status message and a toolbar at the top of the screen that gives the game away.
My only gripe is that I couldn't get LogMeIn to bring sound from the remote computer to my home PC, but this is likely to be an issue that is sorted out before the updated service goes live at the end of September.
Nivio to provide virtual desktops via web
You can get email in a web browser, and even edit documents in a browser using web-based applications such as Google Docs, so why not go the whole hog and have your entire Windows desktop accessed via a browser?
One company that will soon offer users this option is Nivio. Its service lets users subscribe to access a Windows XP desktop through a browser for £7.99 per month. The desktop is hosted by Nivio, and accessed through any browser supporting Java or ActiveX.
Anyone who has used a service such as GoToMyPC or LogMeIn to view their PC desktop remotely will be familiar with the concept, but in this case the system you access isn't a real physical PC, but a virtual one living in a datacentre.
The drawback of this approach is that you can't install your own applications. Nivio provides a selection of free applications such as those from the OpenOffice.org suite, plus others such as Microsoft Office 2003 applications, which cost extra. Once you subscribe to an application, its shortcut appears on your desktop and the app itself is streamed in when you access it.
As you can see from the screenshot, a Nivio hosted desktop is nothing really exceptional to look at – it looks pretty much the same as any other Windows XP desktop, as it should.
Nivio believes that this service could save smaller companies on the cost of owning and managing their own PCs. Customers could instead use terminals or outmoded PCs to access a Windows XP desktop remotely. However, you would have to be pretty confident about the reliability of your internet connection to follow this route.
Another drawback is the difficulty of getting data files on and off your virtual desktop. Nivio provides an application to let you upload and download files, but for this you need….a Windows PC.
When floors and laptops collide
Most well-managed companies employ proper backup procedures to ensure that user data is not lost if a laptop should hit the deck. But there can be slips between cup and lip, and indeed mobile users can all too easily trip over a power lead and bring a laptop crashing to earth - typically when they last logged on to the office network a fortnight ago. In most cases any lost data will be a minor inconvenience, but in others it will be a significant hit to the business.
Fortunately in such situations there are a host of specialist firms who will endeavour to recover data from a dead laptop or damaged hard-drive. Most are capable of taking the disk unit to pieces in a cleanroom and reading the platter surface directly, if necessary. This kind of expertise doesn’t come cheap - prices range from a few hundred pounds up to about £4,000 for a single drive, depending on how much work is needed and how quickly you want results. But when vital data is in bits you’ve become a beggar with not too many options.
Last month we gave a damaged laptop hard-disk to two such specialists, to see what data they could retrieve. The disk had suffered a head-crash and bearing failure, the result of a genuine accident rather than a piece of injudicious drop-testing in our Labs.
The disk is still with the second firm, so a full review of the results would be premature - a detailed account will appear later this month. However, we have already learned some useful facts.
First, it’s worth bearing in mind that any encounter with a data recovery firm is going to cost you. Few specialists put their prices on their web sites, but many make a “no data, no fee” promise. However, in reality it is extremely unlikely that every single file out of the tens of thousands on a typical disk (including system files) will be ruined, so it’s worth clarifying what “no data” means to you if you’re dealing with such a firm.
The second factor worth considering is that the best chance of a full recovery comes from keeping a damaged disk as pristine as possible. Last-gasp attempts to grab files from a faltering disk, or the use of software repair utilities, can make matters worse if the physical damage to the drive is severe.
The snag is, it will often be unclear exactly how severe the physical damage is until you attempt to repair the drive...
All in all, prevention is probably better than the cure, however sophisticated the recovery process. Investing in a batch of memory sticks for mobile users might be the best long-term bet.
Wyse move for resellers
The tests of Wyse Streaming Manager are going well, but things are rarely as easy as they seem at first glance. A sales engineer for Wyse walked me through the process of publishing an application so that it could be streamed to the thin client from the server. He made it look simple.
Later, I tried to follow his steps, taking a system snapshot of the test workstation, installing the application (actually the OpenOffice.org suite), then taking a second snapshot, before building an image from the differences between the two.
This captures the files and settings that the install program has introduced – the essence of the application, in other words.
But after making an application AppSet of this, then adding it to the server and trying to access it from the Wyse terminal, I found that nothing happened.
Hmmm. It seems that there is a certain amount of tweaking that needs to be done once the Publisher has sorted the application wheat from the chaff of all the other files on the system, and it seems that this can be highly specific to the particular application.
Looks like resellers or system integrators with a sound knowledge of the Windows Registry will find themselves in demand if sales of Wyse Streaming Manager pick up....
