Daring Fireball and Tech Crunch clued me in to this foul horror posing as a new email client. Long story short, it turns your email folder into GTA 3-style 3D action.
No I'm not kidding. I wish I was. I actually tried to register for this horror movie myself but I ran into trouble. Their registration page just rejected an email address of the format "blah+blah@gmail.com".
Using the "+" sign in an email address is an entirely "legal" format according to the standards documents and actually is used to perform a valuable function.
If they are too stupid to understand that in 3D Mailbox, and obviously can't be bothered to read the standards documents that underline the product they're creating, how is anyone supposed to trust them with their email?
As for the interface... Well I suspect if you're an idiot gamer who doesn't appreciate that there are other things in life it might hold your attention. For half a day. Maybe. I also suspect that if you get a lot of email it simply won't scale at all.
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Yes, more mobile stuff. What can I say, it's where I've been at work recently. Moving on, has someone launched some kind of new phone recently? There seems to be a lot of fuss in the news at the moment about some kind of Smartphone. Perhaps the HTC Touch is really capturing peoples imaginations (sure I've seen that idea somewhere else lately)? Or the latest Nokia sensation perhaps?
iPhone as an Individual
Anyway, I think Apple have something new out. I'm sure you've probably not noticed because it isn't like anyone has made a big fuss about it just yet. Clearly this phone is going to be a sensation but I don't think it's all that just yet. It's v1.0 hardware and it's set the bar very high for any other new entrants to the field, yet there are some things missing that I find very hard to understand, and a good few critiques are starting to appear among the praise.. Note that I'm writing from the point of view of a European, what with being one and all, the way we use phones is different to America so things I mention here might not be a big deal in the US yet can still be an absolute dealbreaker here.
- One obvious one is 3G. I guess this is an American phone after all, and 3G isn't as popular there as it is in Europe and Asia, but still this one gnaws at me. The iPhone is clearly designed to offer a rich experience for communicating on the move yet it misses fundamental technology for making that anything other than a chore.
- MMS picture messaging. Don't use this much myself to be honest so it wouldn't bother me. But... it is a standard for modern phones, not all of which support email, and by not including this Apple are locking their users out of talking to a lot of people.
- Lack of cut and paste. Or some other method of moving blocks of text between apps. If I get an email with a contact phone-number or URL that's in a format that doesn't get automagically picked up by the phone as a live link to something, how am I supposed to get it into the browser or add it to a contact so I can dial it? What about extracting a block of text from a webpage to email to someone (directions you've found on a website, prices from tickets purchased online, etc).
- Browser limitations and the lack of a 'proper' RSS reader. When you intentionally lock people out of adding their own 3rd party RSS reader you assume responsibility for adding one of your own that can actually step up to the plate and replace it. When you make a big fuss about how amazing your browser is for viewing the web the way it ought to be viewed, you don't leave out things like Flash which are pretty much required for using the Internet today whether we like it or not.
- Apple should have actually finished adding Bluetooth support prior to launch. Seems that all you can do is add a headset at the moment. No hands-free for the car (unless your hands-free kit pretends to be a headset), no transferring files, no wireless sync (c'mon Apple this one is so lame), and no ability to use your phone as an 'emergency' modem to get your laptop onto the Internet.
- Can't download music on the go, and certainly can't use a downloaded song as a ringtone. Hardly a showstopper in terms of functionality, true, but this is something where you just expect more of Apple somehow.
- The inability to add 3rd party software. Don't waste my time pointing at AJAX apps either, you know what I mean here. This is disappointing for two reasons, obviously the inability to expand the device's abilities, and secondly, this is where Windows Mobile and the other phone OSes score big time.
As part of my research putting this article together, I happened across the superb Jeff Attwood's article on the iPhone, and he talks about a lot of the same things that concern me. The iPhone is hopefully going to jumpstart the mobile market in general and the SmartPhone market in particular. HTC have already made one lukewarm response with the HTC Touch I mentioned earlier, and I doubt that will be their only response or that they'll be the only ones to respond. In either case, and especially with WM6 upgrades available, there's life yet in my HTC TyTN.
iPhones in business
This is where some fur will definitely be flying. John Gruber has made much of the attitude of IT departments to devices they can't control, and he manages to make a few very valuable points, but as much as I love your site John and as much as I enjoy reading your thoughts I've got to say I don't think you know how IT works in large business.
Firstly, John talks about the fuss people have made about whether or not iPhone supports Exchange server, and about whether or not IT departments will allow iPhones to work with their email servers. Good, important points here about how Apple are supporting open standards and that products like Exchange should also support these standards. No arguments coming from me on that one.
However, in response to the news that IT departments could enable IMAP but won't, John goes on to say "Translation: IMAP has cooties. Think about it: the difference between IMAP and
Exchange isn’t that only IMAP is exposed to the public. If your
Exchange server wasn’t “exposed”, how would employees receive or send
email while outside the office?"
Not that simple I'm afraid John. In terms of impact on IT, turning on protocols like IMAP has a cost. Supporting IMAP means another service to run on your server, another service to monitor for vulnerabilities and to patch when needed, another hole punched in the firewall, another set of support issues for your corporate helldesk to field on the phones. Once you get into businesses larger than a few people in a loft somewhere then things become a lot less easy.
Let's be clear about a few things here. I'm not player-hating on IMAP. I've supported it for years on various mail systems, my current phone uses it to syphon my mail from the mvps.org servers when I'm out and about, and I've used it on Exchange to support mobile mail back in the days when that was the only way of doing it.
This isn't about any particular protocol 'having cooties', it's about reducing complexity. If I was supporting an Exchange server doing mobile mail for phones that only worked with IMAP I'd be turning off the proprietary Exchange stuff for exactly the same reasons many corporates aren't keen on opening up IMAP when their standards point to Blackberry or MS email push.
John goes on to point at this post on craigslist as an example of the kind of IT admin mentality that stops people using iPhones over IMAP, and suggests that IT departments need to remember they work for the users, not for themselves. Good responses to the craigslist post here and here by the way. Couple of other things of my own here...
Firstly, whoever made that craigslist post is either ranting / joking or is a serious asshat. Or quite possibly both. They absolutely do not speak for me or for any other IT professional I know.
Secondly, John, but I don't work for J. Random Other Employee, sorry, I work for my employer. Seriously, I checked my payslip twice just to make sure. If the business wants to support iPhones then of course I will work hard to make it happen. If the business doesn't want to support them then there's a limit to what I can reasonably do for someone who purchased one of their own. That includes myself - the smart money at work has me down as the first person to come through the doors with an iPhone, but even if that turns out to be true I won't be changing the way our systems operate for just one random employee, even if that employee is me.
Summary
In some ways, the iPhone is the revolution Apple promised. It should shake up the mobile business markets and produce some interesting responses from other phone manufacturers, who should be left in no doubt that if they let things stand as they are right now, Apple will proceed to eat their lunch.
As things stand, I won't be buying a v1 iPhone. It does far less than my current phone. With the problems I list near the start of the article I honestly thing that even with the fantastic interface it would be a downgrade for me right now. Let's be clear about this... each one of the problems I mention at the start of the article are all things that had me stunned when I first found out about them.
At the moment the iPhone is a great statement of intent but in terms of what it can do for you today it's a SmartPhone for people who don't know what a real SmartPhone can do.
Choosing a device
One of my recent projects at work has been to introduce a pilot scheme for smartphone use for college staff who need to stay 'connected' all the time. We've played around with PDAs before, and the college has some conventional mobile phones it can loan to staff going off-site, but we felt that we could do something else a bit more interesting.
After some thought, we selected the HTC Hermes / TyTN as our target platform for this pilot for a number of reasons:
- We had decided that 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, the ability to view and edit Office documents and a hardware keyboard were all requirements in our device.
- The Project's technical lead (Hi there!
) already owns one of these personally and is familiar with the hardware and default software.
- The PDAs we had already experimented with were Windows Mobile devices, and people liked these in general.
- They are easily available through T-Mobile's Web'n'Walk business plan.
- We use Exchange. Exchange can do push e-mail to Windows Mobile phones and push device policies to a phone at no extra cost.
- They can be upgraded to Windows Mobile 6, extending the "shelf life" of the phones.
Policies
I mentioned them quickly above, but they deserve further explanation. Policies with WM devices are a way of ensuring that all devices that sync to an Exchange server protect the information they download from the Exchange server to a 'corporate' standard. An admin can force each device to require a PIN when switched on, set timeout periods of inactivity before asking people to re-enter the pin, and so on. Most importantly of all, the admin can set a device to be wiped if it falls into the hands of a thief who tries to guess the user's device PIN.
Microsoft's exchange blog has a great list of policies for Exchange 2007 that show what they're thinking about here, and there are third party tools out there which add their own wrinkles. I'm not going to tell you what your policies ought to be, and you need to think about things like users who want to connect their own personal devices here as well as configuration for devices owned by the company, but I am going to say you need to make a decision about this at the start of a rollout.
Hardware and Software
With the platform decided on, our next questions were supporting hardware and software.
We purchased one of the TyTNs from T-Mobile in a bundle with a CoPilot GPS device and software. I've got to confess with being a little disappointed with the CoPilot GPS hardware; either someone at CoPilot pulled their documentation on setting this device up out of their ass or it's only designed to work with CoPilot's own software. I much prefer my own Bluetooth GPS which was a fairly cheap purchase at SVP - my GPS might not look fancy but it works with TomTom (and buying TomTom software plus this costs less than the CoPilot bundle!) and it works very well indeed with Microsoft's Mobile Live Search (free download).
We also decided to order USB cradles for all our phones, and this shows the one bad note we've found with T-Mobile so far. I tried to order these cradles from T-Mobile themselves but we were told in no uncertain terms that T-Mobile would only speak to our 'account holder' - and wouldn't even say who they thought that was. I assumed this was my boss (who was out of the office that week) but it turned out to be the college's principal in the end.
Anyway, long story short, we ended up ordering the cradles from another supplier because I really couldn't be bothered to argue with T-Mobile over this; I wouldn't mind if we were ringing up about some aspect of the bill or the calling plan, but making business customers jump through hoops like this to order a few cradles... well.
With the hardware in place, our thoughts turned to software, and we decided on a standard 'build image' of the phone software for all our phones in order to make configuring and supporting these phones easy for us and hence less painful for the users, who can still customise 'their' phones how they please, but at least they'll all be starting from the same place.
To facilitate building this image, our first purchase was SPB Software's Backup software. I've mentioned this before as a fantastic backup tool and we selected this item for three reasons which I'll outline below.
- You get a 20% discount from SPB on all software after your first purchase, which is helpful when you consider we want this software on all our phones and need one licence per phone. Hey, we're a college and it's your (UK readers only) tax money we're trying to save here!
- It allows you to run a scheduled backup as a background task, without the user having to see it happening, and it allows you to protect this backup with a password. In the event of a user off-site managing to mess their phone up, it should be possible to walk them through restoring the phone to the condition it was in at the time of the last backup, which we've scheduled as a nightly process.
- You can make a backup on one phone and restore it on as many other identical phones as you like. Yep, this gives us our "Windows Mobile Ghost" ability to set-up our hardware settings and install software how we want on one phone and distribute this configuration easily and reliably to all our users.
Our next purchase takes us back to SPB software for a couple of licences of GPRS Monitor. We're only using this on a couple of phones in our trial in order to get some figures for 'typical' data use during our trial period, but we feel the information about usage patterns, volume of data and so-on will prove invaluable when deciding on if and how to expand our pilot scheme in the future. We also have one copy of SPB's Mobile Shell, which we're playing with at the moment to decide if it's worth looking at any further.
The rest of the software loaded onto our phones is all freeware of one sort or another.
First up, a little home-brew. Our Exchange server's SSL certificates are issued by a root certificate provider who is well known enough to get into IE and Firefox and Safari with no trouble but who appear not to be in the certificate list for mobile devices... but they offer free certs to educational establishments so it's worth the pain. Anyway, Using the procedure outlined here I created a couple of .cab files to deploy the root and intermediate certificates for this CA so that we can protect our email data to the phones with SSL.
Next up is MortRing. This is a fun piece of software that you might imagine using on a personal device to have a bit of fun assigning different ringtones to SMS messages from different contacts, and it does a fine job of this too I have to say. For our business though, it performs another slightly more serious function, that of replacing pagers for key staff.
At the moment we have very simple pagers - you get sent a page and all it tells you is the extension number you have to ring to find out why you're being paged. Now this actually isn't a problem most of the time, but for first aiders and other people who deal with any other urgent incidents this can represent a big delay in finding out where and why you're being paged. Using MortRing configured to trigger different SMS alert tones based on keywords in a message, we can have our smart phones use one type of alert tone for normal messages, another different tone for first aid incidents, yet another tone for security incidents, and so-on. Not only that, but obviously a SMS message can contain information on where to go and what might be known about the incident, allowing a quicker and more appropriate response to problems.
Next up is Microsoft's Live Search, which I've already mentioned, and Google's Mobile Maps. I personally prefer Live to Google Mobile Maps here, but we've put them both on the phones so people can make their own choice. It isn't like it costs us anything after all. I'd be inclined to characterise GMM as prettier but WLS as probably more useful.
Last up is a tool that isn't really for use by the end users but which we've found quite good for customising the phone images, and that is HTCustom, a freeware tool that gives you easy access to a lot of the most common registry settings and hacks that you'd be likely to want to visit as part of tweaking a Windows Mobile device.
Experiences so far
We're still finding our way with these phones but they are already starting to prove their worth. I'm not entirely sure if being in touch with your office all the time is a blessing or a curse but most people are slowly getting used to the idea that they can be in touch all the time but that they don't have to answer every message or call straight away. One of the things that is now heavily emphasised in our training talks is how to turn the ringer on these phones off when you don't want to be disturbed.
Mailboxes need a bit more organisation; where someone receives a lot of email, such as my 100 or more messages a day, you don't want each single message pushed at you individually, especially when most of the messages are from mailing lists, status notifications, etc. Wanting to keep control of messages pushed out to each phone is meaning that high volume users need to consider message rules to sort things they don't want to know about straight away out of their inbox and into another folder. If you look at this then remember that as push email is a server-side process then any mail rules designed to help control it need to run server-side too. An Outlook client rule is of no help when your computer is turned off because you're in another country.
Tied to the point above is that your default settings should only be a starting point. Users will have different needs and should be helped to set up their devices to help them meet those needs properly. Users should be encouraged to change things to meet their needs and support staff should be able to deal with the increased support burden this brings. While you should work hard to keep the amount of 'official' supported devices to a minimum, you may well have to consider that more than one device is needed to meet the needs of all users.
Training is also important. Different levels of user might need different levels of assistance with getting started with a SmartPhone, both in terms of how they are introduced to the device and in terms of ongoing support. This might be expensive but the cost of supporting a phone so it can be used is always going to be less than the cost of giving someone a phone that they can't get to grips with.
Understand the costs of each phone. What will the contract cost over its term? What does the contract cover and what will the costs be of using something outside the contract (e.g. international roaming, for example). Don't forget the cost of any extra software you need to buy for each phone, and don't forget that things like batteries and spare styluses can almost be considered consumables.
Consider mobile access to other things besides email and calendar. Are there various apps your users might want to access on one of these devices? How will you support that? At the very least, if you have a internet or intranet website with information these users might want to look at (or show to others), how well does it display on a mobile web browser?