Email is no longer peripheral to the way business is done - it's the backbone of many enterprises - and anything that makes it easier for office workers to handle email improves productivity. One obvious way to do that is to provide remote access via a mobile phone. You can read and delete messages with almost any mobile, so you'll be up to speed when you get back to the office. But if you want to reply with much more than yes, no or a voice call, then you need either a keyboard or handwriting recognition.
There are plenty available. Nokia has had the Communicator for years and the latest model, due in summer, will have built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a VGA camera, as well as the Qwerty keyboard. Motorola's MPx will come out around the same time, with similar specifications. It uses Windows Mobile Phone Edition software, and looks different from PDA phones. Closed, it is four inches long. Fold it open one way and it looks like a standard phone, but if you open it sideways, the screen flips to landscape and you can type on the keyboard with both thumbs. The new Voq from Sierra Wireless runs the smart phone version of Windows Mobile, and has no wireless, Bluetooth or camera, but you flip open the keypad to get a Qwerty keyboard.
The Treo 600 and the RIM BlackBerry have full, if tiny, keyboards and, if you are used to typing with your thumbs, you can get a lot done. RIM has reports of users who can manage 40 words per minute, and there are plenty of shortcuts, such as adding full stops automatically when you type two spaces.
The XDA looks like any other Windows Mobile PDA, so it has an on-screen keyboard and handwriting recognition. There's a clip-on fabric keyboard for the Orange SPV, but you have to use it on a flat surface. We're going to see many more form factors as manufacturers work out how to provide the screen, keyboard and battery life users want, with variants for the ways the devices will be used.
There are disadvantages with mobile devices. It's easy to keep the connection between the device and your network secure; it is a lot harder to stop employees losing devices that hold confidential data. Then there's the cost.
Not only are smart phones pricier than standard mobiles, you also need to pay for the GPRS data connection as well as the standard phone bill. Having email on tap isn't going to make everyone productive enough to make the price worthwhile, but if key workers have the information they need to do their jobs better, you will save money.
The 200 plumbers, carpenters and electricians working for the London Borough of Lewisham used to go back to the depot to pick up their job allocation sheets at least once a day, which took up to 45 minutes and did not always give them all the information they needed. They now use O2 XDAs to get the details of jobs that need doing daily, and to send back progress reports and an electronic signature from the tenant once a job is finished. As well as saving them time, they can see how much they've earned from jobs, which has to be good for keeping people motivated.
Office staff also don't have to transfer details from hand-written notes into the computer system. The borough is saving nearly £12,000 a year on fuel, paperwork and printing plus lower premises costs because maintenance staff effectively work from home.
GPRS costs vary and can be unpredictable. Usually, you are charged for the amount of data you send and receive, but it is not easy to work out how many emails and web pages make a megabyte. Matt Millar, of smart phone developers Mobile Innovation, says it is "incredibly opaque. I understand the industry and even I can't tell what is a fair price."
Jason Langridge, Microsoft's business development manager, offers some rules of thumb for data usage. With a PDA such as an XDA or a Treo 600, expect to get through around 7MB of data a month. With a smart phone, it is more like 4MB a month, mainly because you can't deal with as many attachments.
If you are using a GPRS phone card in a laptop, you will be sending and receiving much more data - and waiting longer for messages. You will have a bigger screen and all your usual applications so you'll do more, but those applications aren't as efficient as the email client in a smart phone, so they send much larger files for the same information. The BlackBerry compresses data into 2K packets, so the start of each message arrives quickly, and it won't download the rest of a longer message until you ask for it. BlackBerry tariffs are usually higher than the charges for standard phones but the simplicity and speed are what fans swear by.
Flat monthly tariffs are the easiest for users, but are expensive for the network operator if you use more bandwidth than they have predicted. Look for deals such as Orange's business tariff, which lets you share the monthly data quota among users.
If travelling abroad with a GPRS phone, keep an eye on the networks you use, because GPRS roaming costs vary enormously. It can be cheaper to use GPRS roaming in Europe than to pay the top tariff on some UK networks, but if you end up on a network that isn't partnered with your provider, the cost will rocket.
T Mobile users pay a flat rate of £7.50 for GPRS even when roaming, as long as they are on a network that interconnects with T Mobile. If you are with O2, using GPRS in Germany costs £6 per megabyte with an O2 partner network, but if you roam on to T Mobile, you will pay £18 per megabyte. Orange users usually pay £8.50 a megabyte to roam, but on AT&T in the US, it's £20. You can find out the cost in advance, but few bother: we expect mobiles to make the right connection automatically.
In fact, network operators would rather you used their partners for roaming, and most phones are set up to look for partner networks first. However, if another network has a stronger signal or puts a mast closer to the airport, you could easily end up with the wrong connection. Nokia's Niklas Savander predicts that "it's only a matter of time until all devices have software that makes it difficult or impossible to pick an expensive network".
Until then, find out who charges what where so you're not paying over the odds to be productive.
Links
BlackBerry
www.blackberry.com/uk
Treo 600
www-5.palmone.com
Orange SPV
http://web.orange.co.uk/yourphone
O2 XDA
www.xda-2.co.uk
Nokia Communicator
http://www.nokia.co.uk/nokia/0,,18190,00.html
Voq
www.voq.com/site/default.voq
Motorola MPX
<A HREF="http://direct.motorola.com/experience/GBR/ENG/MPx200/MPx200_homepage"
