A quest for e-mail on the go

Even when I’m away on vacation, I like to keep in touch. I think anyone who’s a vital cog in his organization (or who likes to think he is) learns quickly that important e-mail piles up quickly. I sometimes need a whole day after a week-long vacation just to sort through my e-mail backlog. So I recently tested several ways of extending my Net connection to my pocket.

All I wanted was some kind of data service that could run on a portable device. I wanted to be able to receive and respond to text e-mail messages–any other functions were gravy.

The first unit I tried was a basic Motorola PageWriter 2000 alphanumeric pager. I’ve been using this for years when I travel. It fits nicely in a pocket–which of course means it has a tiny keyboard and a minuscule screen. It also limits the length of the messages you can exchange. While this was a great unit circa 1997, I knew there had to be something better.

An evolutionary step up from the alphanumeric pager is RIM’s BlackBerry 957 handheld, which receives e-mail forwarded from your desktop over a wireless network. I installed an agent application on my desktop machine and was able to get e-mail quickly and reliably.

Like most PDAs, the 957 provides basic calendar, contact, and to-do list applications. On the downside, responding to e-mail or entering any data is a bit tough. The BlackBerry’s keyboard is about as tiny as the PageWriter’s–tough to type on with your thumbs, and impossible to touch-type on. The 957 is lighter than the PageWriter, but longer and thinner, making it less well-suited for a hip pocket and better suited for a vest or shirt pocket.

Moving further up the food chain, I tested a Nextel i85 phone and service plan. Nextel offers a data service called Mobile Email, which is a private-branded version of ViAir’s WirelessInbox service. To use it, you run software on your PC that, like BlackBerry’s, examines your regular inbox and forwards the messages you choose to your phone. You can send back canned responses, or, using the phone’s number pad, laboriously compose original replies.

Nextel also offers a range of wireless data services, providing things like headline news and stock quotes. The nice thing about the Nextel option was the ability to respond immediately to e-mails by voice. On the other hand, any kind of text response is excruciating, and the phone’s tiny LCD screen–smaller even than the pager’s–is not the best medium for communication.

Moving on to slightly bigger and better things, I tried out a Compaq iPaq 3835 handheld with an expansion sleeve, and a Sierra Wireless AirCard 300 wireless modem. The combination gave me wireless access to the Web, e-mail, and instant messaging.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t an ideal combination, either. Connectivity was spotty–sometimes I couldn’t get a connection to the AT&T Wireless CDPD network that provided the service. When I did connect, downloads went slowly, limited to approximately 12Kbps throughput at best.

The tiny size of the display window was also a big handicap, especially when viewing Web pages. And trying to compose a return message by tap-tap-tapping with a stylus on an image of a keyboard was only slightly easier than thumbing the BlackBerry’s keyboard. Using a Stowaway keyboard probably would have been easier, but attaching a keyboard to a handheld and then having to find a flat place to compose is a bit of a chore.

I next moved up the scale to a full-fledged portable PC, a Sony VAIO PictureBook PCG-C1VN. With a 600MHz Transmeta Crusoe CPU, it’s not the fastest portable around, but it weighs less than 2.5 pounds and takes up only about as much space as a hardback book. The screen supports resolutions of up to 1,024×480 pixels, which means it’s about as wide but only half as high as a typical display. I found that less annoying than the half-as-high, half-as-wide screen of the iPaq. Like most laptops, the PictureBook sports an attached keyboard, and offers the same range of applications I normally use on my desktop.

However, I soon discovered that compared with a handheld, a notebook PC is a pain to carry around. And I still had connectivity difficulties. I could use the AirCard in the notebook, but its throughput was very slow. I tried packing 802.11b wireless adapters, and they worked great, but wireless access points are few and far between.

Bottom line: I had some fun trying out these gizmos, but didn’t find in any of them an ideal solution for keeping up with my e-mail while I’m out of the office.

Can Novell survive?

In the journalism game, certain topics are referred to as “evergreen,” meaning you can write about them time and again. In our little corner of the business, an evergreen topic for almost a decade has been: “Can Novell survive?”

Novell once owned the network operating system (NOS) market, but now claims less than a 20 percent share. What happened? Microsoft revved up its marketing machine and Linux came out of nowhere–all while Novell sat on its laurels.

Now Novell is bringing back Chris Stone as vice chairman to help turn the company around. It’s a return to the nest for Stone, who left Novell after a stint with the company in October 1999 to found Tilion, a supply chain event management service provider. He returns to a Novell very different from the company he left two and a half years ago.

Since then, Novell has realized it can no longer compete based on its software alone. Its marquee product–file and print services–is widely available from other vendors, and even directory services have become ubiquitous. Almost exactly a year ago, the company announced it would acquire Cambridge Technology Partners in the hopes of being able to provide customers with lucrative consulting services. So far, the stock market hasn’t given the merged firm much to crow about; its stock price is down about 30 percent from where it was when the merger was announced.

Of course, financial analysts are in no position to tell you whether Netware might make sense for your company. I think it still can. No one beats Novell’s file and print services. The latest version of the software, Netware 6, runs mostly over native TCP/IP, so you don’t need to roll out client software to every node on your network. The software also includes nifty, browser-based server management features. If you find you’re spending too much time managing networking basics or untangling directory service issues, you owe it to yourself to evaluate Netware 6.

His new boss, Novell chairman and CEO Jack Messman, calls Stone “a visionary.” That’s not what Novell needs now. It needs a down-and-dirty fighter who can find a compelling reason for organizations to add Novell’s products and services to their networks. Novell needs to stake a claim in one of the rapidly evolving market spaces it already plays in–such as XML, security, or Web services–and let potential customers know how it will improve their bottom lines.

Novell’s existing customer base should hope that Stone can keep others with an existing investment in Netware from defecting, and grow the business in other areas. If Novell can show signs of growth along with the evidence of innovation Netware 6 represents, it might make defectors who turned to a Windows server NOS consider returning to the fold.

Is it time to count Novell out? Not yet. I haven’t heard anyone suggest the company is in real fiscal difficulties; though the stock price is down, the company ought to be able to survive for years to come, which means you’ll still get support for any product you buy now. If Stone and his new colleagues can succeed in re-establishing Novell in the minds of corporate buyers, the company could actually surprise a lot of doubters.

Enterprise PDAs: Set your priorities

Which device do you never leave behind when you go on a business trip? Today it might be a simple pager or mobile phone. But in the near future, you will likely depend on a much more sophisticated handheld computer to perform a wide variety of business functions. Although today’s devices can make phone calls, track appointments, and send e-mail and instant messages, their capabilities have yet to warrant widespread corporate rollouts.

This year, competition for the corporate use of the portable devices some call personal digital assistants (PDAs), or handheld PCs, will be fierce. According to a recent Gartner report, big changes are coming to the handheld marketplace this year. Gartner predicts a merger of Palm and Handspring and a decline in sales for RIM’s Blackberry platform.

It’s clear that the Pocket PC has become a formidable competitor to the once indomitable Palm–but look for Palm to make a big push in the corporate market later this year. To see how the competition is heating up, take a look at one of the latest units from each camp–HP’s Jornada 568 and Palm’s i705. The Pocket PC platform, with a faster processor, more RAM, and backlit color screen, does a far better job at displaying images and offers better tools for handling multimedia content. It also comes bundled with mobile versions of Word and Excel, the two most popular desktop applications for Windows. In the enterprise, let’s just say that Palm faces an uphill battle to match its success with consumers.

Consumers have flocked to the Palm platform because of its solid contact manager and a far wider range of available third-party software–and it costs a lot less than the Pocket PC. Though it lacks the speed and graphics of the Pocket PC, you can get a Palm device built into a phone, a la Handspring’s intriguing Treo. You can’t get a Pocket PC/phone combo yet, though Microsoft last month announced a new initiative to build such a device.

Microsoft is looking to bridge the gap in the number of available applications. It offers a Pocket PC developer program that goes head-to-head with Palm’s, but Palm’s longer time on the market and generally simpler environment give it a bit of an edge in development tools.

Of course, Palm and Pocket PC aren’t your only choices. Sharp’s Linux-based Zaurus SL-5500 and others are trying to bring Linux’s open source advantages to a mobile platform. That will keep device costs down, as manufacturers don’t have to pay to license the operating system, and may allow you to run some of the same applications on your handheld as you can on your Linux desktop. (You all have Linux desktops, don’t you?)

You may worry about the security of information on your handheld PC. Both Palm and Pocket PC offer plenty of security add-ins, but your best bet is not to put anything sensitive on a device that’s so easily lost, or to encrypt the files. And save the money you’d spend on handheld antivirus programs–there simply aren’t enough such viruses to make this software cost-effective. Besides, recovering from a PDA virus is generally as simple as resynchronizing your device after a hard reset.

How do you decide which device is right for you? It’s a matter of setting your priorities. Some factors to consider:

Price — Pocket PC devices cost more, but you get more too.

Desktop compatibility — Running Windows and Microsoft Office? Pocket PC plays well with them. If you have Linux on your desktop, on the other hand, you might like a Linux PDA. And Mac users’ best option may be the clean simplicity of a Palm device.

Expandability — Look for devices whose operating systems you can upgrade, and to which you can add more memory. Look for expansion slots for Compact Flash or Secure Digital devices, or add-on sleeves that provide expansion capabilities.

Finally, a piece of personal advice: If you plan to do much data entry, get an external keyboard for your PDA. For serious note-taking, handwriting recognition or tapping on an on-screen keyboard just doesn’t cut it. Landware’s GoType keyboard is my favorite for Palm devices, while the Stowaway, made by Think Outside and sold by Targus and HP, among others, is a good choice for Pocket PCs.