MS Office on smartphones

Folks you might wanna pay a bit closer attention to this one and why I say Windows Mobile is bit of a warning lable if you expect to make good use of your smartphone. Thats right! I said it: its a warning label!

When buying a smartphone, users often presume that getting a Windows Mobile based phone means they would get better usage and support for their MS Office files. Its probably one of the worst myths in the world of smartphones. You cant entirely blame them for this faulse assumption. One would expect "Windows" based smartphone to give better functionality for Word documents, Excel sheets and Power Point presentations. Unfortunately, it doesnt work that way. If only people could google a bit more before investing in a smartphone or better still... read my blog!

Most people would find it strange or might even be reluctant to believe that the first generation of ESeries smartphones came with Nokias own application, Documents, for accessing MS Office files, was so good that not only it was better than any 3rd party software, it was actually better than Microsoft's own devices! Its not just Mobile Review who declared Nokia's MS Office capabilities to be superior to Microsoft's proposition, others have been expressing their frusration with even with just document viewing on Windows Mobile. funny huh? well if you use Microsoft Windows (and most likely you do), its not that hard to believe.

But come on! how hard is it to have a quick browse on the net to find out the most suitable software or using MS files on any smart phone? to figure that Quick Office is probably currently the most popular solution. Until recently, Office 2007 files were not supported by any smartphones, and yes not even for Windows Mobile. But now finally this has been fixed and solutions are availble for most devices. QuickOffice has also just released Premier 5.0 now supports Office 2007 on Symbian smartphones.

Better than that! the ESeries phones like E61 and E62 both come with excellent and comprehensive a built- in full Office suite which allows you to view, edit and create Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. For both these devices, contacts, calendar, tasks and notes, all of them easily sync to Microsoft Outlook using the included PC Suite. And if you're a power user, you probably already own or at least eyeing the E90.

E61 Screens

The lesson learned? Windows Mobile does not mean it gives better support for MS Office, in fact you might even wanna treat "Windows Mobile" as a warning lable (indulge me a little), specially if you wanna use your Windows Mobile device with Vista.


Bilal
http://elanist.com/bilal

Controlling your PC with your phone

thats right! if you didnt know this before now you do. You can not only use your mobile phone as a TV remote (since ages ago), you can use your regular mobile phone to control sotware applications on your PC (or Mac). Specially if your phone is based on Symbian S60, and even better if you have an E-series phone. In fact the new Salling Clicker software is actually native for E-series phones like the E61. And it uses WiFi or Blue Tooth for connecting to your PC, and does all the detection for you. PRETTY cool!

thats all there's to it. you can control software and send and recieve data and sort of be able to see whats happening on the PC as well.

there's are a lot of possibilities here folks! all depends on how far can your evil mind think. Look at what people were doing with a simple infrared control 10 years ago! consider this: when Palm Pilot was still the rage, car thieves actually used Pilot's infrared port to pick up frequencies of car locks from a distance. then used their Palm Pilot to unlock and steal the cars. this became quite a problem in the UK if I remember correctly.

and I'm not even going to mention what people did with the zero lux infrared capability of the olddd Soney handycams (my blog is PG13 remember?). Point is, we give you the stuff, your devilish mind should do the rest, and there's a LOT of devilish stuff you can do with a kickass smartphone like the E61 and its siblings.

Bilal
http://buzzzword.blogspot.com/

Smartphones for "smart" users?

yeeeaah... not really, they are just users, smart or not. like before the web made internet ubiquitous (thats a smart word for "being everywhere"), like 10-12 years ago, computer users were expected to be smart people. Now computers are as commonly used by everyone as the TV (a.k.a the Idiot Box). Get the picture?

At the moment, what matters is, what would you use your smart phone for. Until now users choose smartphones for their "needs". But it will very rapidly become a "want". Remember a time when nobody thought they really need a mobile phone? Well by year 2010, analysts are expecting 250 million smartphones to be in the market. I think the number would be higher, probably much higher. Analysts often underestimate the irrationality of the mindset of general consumers when it comes to such gadgets.

So there is no doubt smartphones are quickly going to become mainstream. The real interesting thing for me would be, what sort of smartphones would become ubiquitous? The OS would be the key differential here. Eventually it comes down to the market penetration of the OS, the ease of use, the features, as I had been saying in my previous postings. Already Symbian has such high penetration that the common user doesnt know and doesnt care what OS their phone is running on. Why should they? they never have to install it, they never have to reformat their phone because it "crashed" again, they dont have to constantly keep it upgraded with patches, they dont have to keep worrying that their current version of Windows is so outdated or that their new Windows is still so buggy and unstable. They replace their phones long before they have to worry about its OS or utilities get outdated. And even if they dont replace it, it still works just fine for years even! Thats how comfortable the general Symbian users have been all this while, such that they didnt need to bother what OS they are on.

Actually its kinda funny that a good friend of mine (Alec Ee) has been using Treo for a couple of years (for the "non-smart" users, Treo uses Palm OS), simply because he had so many problems with their phones they always had to replace it for him within the warranty period, so he kept going with it. Until finally he had so many problems with Treo he recently bought himself an O². Today he just told me that he is so frustrated with the O², he has been checking out mobile phone shops to trade it in!

Bilal Zaheer
http://elanist.com/bilal