Life in the mobile lane

SPENDING

The advertisement, "Blackberry to keep dad out of office", is a clear indication that phones are suddenly not equipment to facilitate only conversation. There was a time when you could aviodfrom your despotic boss with an excuse saying that the lousy dial up connection was playing truant or the cable internet connectivity was down or worse still - your laptop crashed. Cut short to the present - What kind of excuse could you offer when your boss is yelling at you to send that Power Point presentation via your "smart phone"? Sigh... Wish it was as simple as Dick Tracy's one-way radio watch...

In a nutshell, smart phone features tend to include, snazzy touch screens, Internet access, e-mail access, scheduling software, built-in camera (not in all cases), contact management, accelerometers and some navigation software as well as occasionally the ability to read business documents in a variety of formats such as PDF and Microsoft Office. And awash in the Indian market in various shapes, sizes and budgets (starting from a minimum of Rs 15,000), they are changing the definition of corporate remote accessibility as we know.

Budget Rs 10,000-20,000
Nokia E62
Price "� Rs 13,000 approx

You take one look at the E62, and you're not thinking smartphone. You're thinking that this is Nokia's move to take on the perceived might of Blackberry devices. At some point, the smartphone stops becoming a phone, and in fact becomes a PDA. Nokia has been pushing this envelope with the Exx series of phones, and with the E61 and now E62, it's crossed the line.

Boasting various software customisations including 4 push email solutions and a good IM client, the E62 is a quad band GSM world phone with EDGE for data. It's a smartphone running Symbian OS 9.1 with Nokia's S60 3rd Edition software. You can sync it to Outlook, browse the web in full HTML glory, add 3rd party software, listen to music using the inbuilt stereo headset and watch videos. It has a brilliant 320 x 240 pixel colour display, QWERTY thumb keyboard and Bluetooth.

The E62 supports fewer video formats using Real Player for video which plays Real files, some 3GP and Divx (MPEG4) formats. The web browser provides a desktop-like experience with support for Javascript, frames, dHTML and CSS. The email client, is a powerful application that handles SMS, MMS, POP3 and IMAP email (with SMTP for sending email). Though it lacks a camera, the Nokia can both send and receive MMS and supports photo caller ID. The E62 comes with installers for BlackBerry Connect, GoodLink, Mail for Exchange, and Cingular Xpress Mail, making the phone a push email addict's dream. The devil wears Prada and swaggers around with an E62!

Sony Ericsson M600i
Price "� Rs 15,800 approx

The M600i is a 3G-capable smartphone with Bluetooth 2.0, GPRS, infrared and USB 2.0 for connectivity. Blessed with a touchscreen interface and a modified QWERTY keypad the M600i is powered by the Symbian OS v9.1 UIQ 3. 80MB of internal memory provides ample storage for applications and user data, supplemented by the M2 expansion port. Messaging options include e-mail, SMS and MMS, and aside from the dual function keypad, text entry options also include an onscreen virtual keyboard and handwriting recognition.

When switching on or off the M600i, a flight mode option is presented so that you can access organiser functions without disobeying airline rules banning the use of mobile phones. Rounding out its business features is the Quickoffice suite for editing Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and a PDF viewer. Balancing work with leisure, the M600i has a music and a video player with support for a plethora of formats including MP3, AAC, MPEG-4, MP3, 3GPP and Real Media. Exchange Active Sync allows push synchronisation of their e-mail, calendar and contacts for companies on Microsoft Exchange Server 2003.

Budget Rs 20,000-25,000
Dopod 900
Price "� Rs 25,000 approx

The GSM tri-band Dopod 900 is one of the first 3G-capable PDA phones shod with Windows Mobile 5.0 OS. Clearly a smart PDA, the 900's Office applications have been upgraded such as added support for embedded images, tables and charts. Equipped with a 1,3 mega pixel camera and memory expansion port the 900 has a touch screen outputting 16-bit colour.

The 900 can playback movies (MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, 3gpp etc), MP3s and other audio formats smoothl on Wi-Fi and EDGE-enabled networks. Though laden with Pocket Outlook, Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, PowerPoint Mobile, Internet Explorer, MSN Messenger, ClearVue PDF, the Dopod 900's hefty price tag of nearly Rs 25,000 has few takers.

I-Mate JAQ3
Price "� Rs 25,000 approx

The I-mate JAQ3 sports a sleeker design and adds a 2-megapixel camera and integrated Wi-Fi. The

Windows Mobile 5 smart phone also has integrated Bluetooth, push e-mail capabilities, and the I-mate Suite, which provides extra productivity and security utilities to the business user. The Jaq3 offers a number of improvements over the Jaq as well as some proprietary applications to differentiate it from other Windows Mobile Pocket PC phones. The full Office Mobile Suite, including Word Mobile, Excel Mobile and a PowerPoint viewer is included. ClearVue PDF is onboard if you need to view PDFs.

Outlook Mobile comes with the JAQ3 as part of the Office Mobile Suite and supports Microsoft's Direct Push technology for real-time e-mail delivery. I-mate includes its own e-mail client, which you can set up via the phone's Club I-mate e-mail application. Instant, text, and multimedia messaging are all supported. In addition to these applications, the Jaq3 also ships with the I-mate Suite, which provides productivity and security tools to the business user. There are three applications in total: I-mate 1-View for remote access to your desktop or network; I-mate back-up for remotely backing up data and; I-mate Control so that your company's IT department can remotely configure or troubleshoot the Jaq3.

Blackberry Pearl 8100
Price "� Rs 25,000 approx

With RIM's new BlackBerry Pearl (known in some markets as the 8100), the company has given us a BlackBerry that looks like a regular phone and supports typical consumer functionality, even if it still requires that back- end support and its associated cost.

Sporting quad-GSM connectivity, the Pearl is EDGE-enabled but it does not have Wi-Fi, 3G & video recorder. This is the first Blackberry to offer a 1.3 mega pixel camera. Though internal memory is only 64 MB, the expandable memory option more than makes up for this limitation. The browser is not efficient out of the box. User will have to configure the right options, such as: JavaScript, HTML Tables, CSS style sheets, background colours, foreground colours. Once that is done, things look pretty good. There is even an option for having the browser emulate common browsers such as OpenWave,

Pocket IE and NetScape. The Pearl does boast of superior push e-mail capabilities. The Pearl has decent multimedia support for various video formats, including AVI, MP4, MOV and 3GP files. For music, the BlackBerry Pearl supports MP3, AAC, MIDI, and WAV files, among others.

Other than these new capabilities, the BlackBerry Pearl retains many of the same features that has made BlackBerrys popular, such as e-mail. The smart phone can sync with your company's BlackBerry Enterprise server with support for Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, or Novell GroupWise to deliver corporate e-mail in real time. It also supports up to 10 personal/business POP3 or IMAP4 e-mail accounts. The handset also includes popular instant-messaging clients such as Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and ICQ.

Budget Rs 25,000-30,000
Sony Ericsson W950i
Price "� Rs 28,000 approx

The W950i minus a camera is Sony Ericsson's flagship Walkman phone, and is one of the most unusual phones to be released in 2006. Designed as a music player and business phone, the W950i meets the needs of its target market perfectly. Boasting of Quad-band GSM connectivity, a large touch screen size, the W950i has 4 GB of internal memory goodness and is powered by the newest Symbian OS. Push email is supported, together with a viewer for common Office attachments. 3G (Which still hasn't debuted here) provides fast download speeds, and full web browsing is available with the Opera 8.0 web browser. The built in handwriting software is up to task and is a boon for those who prefer to scribble away their mails. An important point to note is the lack of Wi-Fi and camera but then again the target group is clearly defined "� The workaholic CEO, who occasionally like to shake a leg all alone.

Palm Treo 700P
Price "� Rs 30,000 approx

The Treo 700p combines the benefits of a full featured mobile phone with the Palm OS mobile computing platform. The Treo 700p is powered by a 312 MHz PXA270 Intel XScale processor. The device has been given a much needed boost in the memory department. The 700p includes 128 MB of non-volatile (NVFS) chip for internal program memory, of which 60 MB is user-available. The handset also offers a memory expansion slot.

The 700p includes a 1.3 megapixel digital camera on the top back side of the device. It can take photos at a max resolution of 1280 x 1024 and has 2x digital zoom. It also records video clips with audio at a 352 x 288 resolution. The 700p also has built in Bluetooth wireless capabilities. The 700p has an impressive set of new multimedia capabilities for a palm device. Both video and audio streaming over the Internet is now built in. Thanks to the high-speed EVDO connection and streaming software, you can access Windows Media player format streaming video and audio to the device.

Versamail v3.51 is included as the default email client, and has been renamed to simply "Email." It supports POP, IMAP and Microsoft Exchange accounts. The program also has preset support for Gmail, Yahoo Mail, .Mac, AOL email and others. For Enterprise users whose organisations run Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, the Treo 700p has built in Exchange Server ActiveSync that will directly import and enable corporate email, calendar and contact synchronisation. Blazer v4.5 is included for browsing the web. Blazer has been enhanced with new caching rules that make browsing both mobile device optimised and full size websites a more pleasant experience.