Review - Mobile TS - Simplicity at it's finest

Well, some time back I got the opporunity to review DDH Software's Mobile TS.

What initially led me to do this review was that we (like more and more people in NZ) are switching to Linux and using Windows only in a terminal server evironment. Like anyone doing this, it often leaves a couple of legacy applications requiring a Windows Terminal Server for easy access until they are either migrated or ported. Being the owner of the company and on the road a lot I thought to myself, wouldn't it be nice to be able to access potentially all our applications from my Treo 650 while on the road. I figured that some things probably wouldn't work out but if I could get simple information such as accounting reports, quotes, perhaps even use the Groupwise mail client for those situations when a treo mail app doesn't quite cut it, things would be quite peachy.

Our Back End Setup
Before proceeding you probably need to understand a little about our setup. In New Zealand, until very very recently it has been hard to get good bandwidth without giving up your first born (or perhaps just a kidney) due to some things which I won't go into here (other than to say the government has finally stepped in). Therefore our connection to the used MS Terminal Server was only 256k in both directions. We have about 10 people on a Linux based Novell Open Enterprise Server on the internal LAN and one external user permanently connected via terminal services. We have the usual array of web hosted applications such as WebMail etc, but other than that our users are external only when travelling with laptops (or Mobile TS ;}) I provide this information so you can make an assessment on any speed comments.

Installation
Well, as I mentioned we use Linux, so presently this means no Palm desktop as it only runs on Windows and Mac, so I unzip the prc file and send to my phone with bluetooth (hey it's easier anyway), no worries here, I now have a shiny new Mobile TS icon where it should be in the Unfiled section on my Treo.

Configuration
Upon clicking the Icon we are presented with the Mobile TS Main screen, basically the heart of anything you wish to do. This is the number one thing I like about this application, it's simplicity at it's finest, all the options you could ever need are one click away from this screen. To connect to our Terninal Server all I have to do is click 'New' and enter the name and address of our server. For me the server address is a simple ts.ourdomain.co.nz for you it may be the ip address of your individual internet connection. (FYI, if you want to use this for your home PC I'd recommend looking up someone like www.dynu.com so you don't have to enter a new address value every time you access your desktop).

That's it! I can now click 'Connect' and the application and the phone take care of the rest, it's so unbelievably simple.

Using Mobile TS
Once you've chosen connect you are presented with the familiar windows login screen. You enter your username and password and hit OK (the enter button on the Treo 650 is conveniently mapped the same as the PC keyboard's enter button so I just use that).

Now a couple of major minor irritants occur. Firstly, I have my palm set to auto off at 30 seconds, this is fine for everyday use of contacts etc, but not OK (at least in it's current form) for using Mobile TS. Everytime the screen turns off I am disconnected from the Terminal server and must reconnect and login again. So provided you have your timeout set right on your phone and you concentrate on using Terminal Services solidly for the session this doesn't really effect you. And after all, terminal services saves your session when you're disconnected so you can start off straight where you left. Besides doing this would save you data on your data plan and battery life when you're not using it anyway right?

Impressively MobileTS detects your pda resolution size as being 320x320, passes that onto your Terminal Server and all the icons and buttons in terminal server are arranged to match this. I have my start button at the bottom left and in an application have the file menu arranged perfectly at the top of the screen, no scrolling necessary. The downside is however that there is limited room, so if you have an app with a lot of menus they start taking up more and more of the precious screen space. However in most cases this really is a great feature, I can't stress how much I personally hate scrolling around a screen on a PDA over a slow GSM data connection.

If you so wish, (such as the case may be if you're using higher bandwidth connections such as WIFI) you can manually set your screen resolution to be higher than your pda's default resolution with a simple click in the Global options screen (accessible from the main screen mentioned above). Hell, you could make it the same screen size as a normal desktop if you wanted. With this setup you can use the 5 way navigation pad to scroll around the screen like a yoyo. Above I mentioned about not liking scrolling over a slow GSM connection, I should point out in some Terminal Services apps I've seen when scrolling around they have to download and redraw the whole screen just so you can get to a particular menu for example and then only to go back to where you came from for another button and they redraw and download that part again. With Mobile TS however, it literally caches the whole screen image and scrolls around that without having to download parts of it each time you need something that is out of the viewable area. This definately saves on time, frustration, cost of download data and battery life.

Summary
The one gripe I personally had was that I still found it hard to keep my phone from disconnecting. This is mostly due to me getting distracted and not keeping it doing enough to stop the phone from turning the screen off, therefore this may not effect you. I also suspect some of these issues are actually generated by a lacking GSM network here in NZ.

To make the product near perfect for me, I'd add two features. They'd be a palm timeout feature override while in Mobile TS and the option to statically enter your username and possibly password into Mobile TS to save entering it yourself all the time when disconnected.

If you need access to things on the road this is a great application, it's simple, functional and does everything you want. The speed of it is great, even with the occassional latency issue. I should also point out that I've used the windows version of this application that is packaged with the MS Windows smartphones and I believe MobileTS to be a much better package.

Mobile TS is a clear 9/10 for me. Available here.

Posted by Quentin Jackson - Associate Writer, Papakura, New Zealand