Additional memory for your PDA phones

GIZMO GALLERY: i-mate's 1-view allows to access your files from your desktop/server in a matter of seconds.

Sure, you can always add on more memory chips to your high-end PDA- and smart-phones, but there’s no way you can store everything your laptop has on them. And certainly not what your office server has, right?

Five-year old Dubai-based i-mate, which claims it has a 40 per cent market share in the country for Windows-based PDA- and smart-phones, has come up with a solution that, at $90 a year, allows you to extend your mobile device’s memory almost infinitely.

The 1-view works only on the i-mate range of PDA- and smart-phones, so if you have a HP Ipaq, for instance, and don’t intend replacing it, don’t waste your time reading this piece.

i-mate’s 1-view software allows users to access files from their desktop/server using the standard GPRS facilities most mobile phone firms offer, in a matter of seconds. You can also back up all the data on your phone on to a remote server, and also allow i-mate (or your office tech-team) to access your phone remotely, to iron out kinks in it, or even delete data in case the phone is lost/stolen.

Apart from the back-up service, no other service uses the i-mate server. In case you’re accessing a file from your office server, for instance, it goes from your office server in an encrypted form, and gets decrypted only after it has been recieved on your i-mate PDA-phone.

In which case, there is no possibility of your data getting stolen/compromised unless, of course, someone figures out the encryption/decryption keys and manages to access the data while it is in the air.

The way it works is quite simple. I tried it out on my laptop at home, and company executives say a similar process is used for a server-based system. You have to install the 1-view software which is about 25 MB in size onto the laptop. Apart from this, the PC/server also needs to have a dotnet framework which is something Microsoft gives out routinely with standard Windows packages.

While doing this, you get prompts asking you to define what directories you want to be shared (that is, viewed on your or your colleague’s PDAs). So, if you don’t want some files to be shared, like your family photographs, just put them in a directory that’s not to be shared.

You can do the same for the files on the PDA as well. While loading, you specify which PDAs can access the information, and you are asked to name the devices and provide icons for each. When I did this on my laptop, I was original enough to say my laptop should be called Laptop and my phone be called Phone! You can be more creative.

Getting connected Once this is done, you need to log in, either on the PDA or on the laptop, and once you do this, the GPRS gets activated immediately. I was, within a matter of a few seconds, able to see, on the PDA, all the files on my laptop — the directories, actually. I chose to access an article I’d written on telecom for NCAER’s Margin magazine from my laptop.

About 10-15 seconds later, the file was with me on the latest JAMin. I then made a slight change to the file, and via-GPRS uploaded it back on to the laptop. A few seconds later, the JAMin indicated the upload was complete, I then did a download on the laptop — all over within 15 seconds or so, complete with the changes I’d made to the file.

The presentation that i-mate officials left with me showed the possible uses of the facility. Mary, one of the slides said, is in a meeting and a client wanted some figures she didn’t have on her PDA, so within a matter of seconds, Mary accesses the file from her office server and shows a spreadsheet to the client.

In another, Jack (or was it Joe?) is sitting in the park clicking pictures, and finds that, over a period of time, his PDA’s disk is getting full. So, he uploads the pictures to his desktop at home, via the GPRS. The possibilities are enormous. Of course, you can do the same with email — but that’s slower, and requires someone to be on both sides, to operate the PDAs as well as the laptop.

What you can’t do, and this is a drawback, is to access your Outlook. So, if there are some notes you’ve got on Outlook, you can’t fetch them remotely.

But i-mate says it is working on this, as well as push-mail of the type Blackberry already offers (through Airtel in India) and Hutch is in the process of coming out with — Hutch offers push mail for corporates which requires a server to be placed in their offices, and hopes to offer individual solutions (for your Gmail and Yahoo!mail, for instance) soon.

Sabeer Bhatia, of Hotmail fame, for instance, has developed a solution that allows you to access your Outlook through simple text messages — he was able to get his passport details using a simple SMS when we met — but his solution doesn’t allow you to fetch files.

Of course, unlike the 1-view, which is only for i-mate phones, his solution can be used for all phones. Tata Indicom is also working on a similar program with will allow access to your laptop/server.

Just JAMin: The JAMin, which is the latest version of the popular JAM, works on Windows 5 as opposed to the earlier Windows 2003. The biggest plus, of course, is that the JAMin offers “persistent storage” — that means, when your battery drains out, your memory doesn’t, so you don’t have to do a back up and restore all the time like you did on the earlier range of PDA phones.

At 2 megapixels, the camera’s a lot better than the earlier JAM’s 1.3, and the new instrument has a 128 MB ROM. Like all i-mates, there’s an upgradeable MMC/SD card with prices ranging from Rs 800 for a 256MB card to Rs 5,000 for a 1GB one.

The JAMin’s processor speed is 200 Mhz as compared to 400 Mhz in the JAM — this reduces the battery consumption but, thanks to some design changes, doesn’t materially slow down the PDA. The manufacturers claim the talk time is now up to around 150 minutes from 90 and the standby time to 60 hours from the earlier 48 or thereabouts.

At Rs 38,000, it’s expensive compared to other high-end machines, and that’s something the company probably needs to work on.