Review: Mobile TS (RDC for Palm)

“My computer isn’t working,” the secretary said over the phone.

I only had a few minutes before my meeting began, but I knew she couldn’t wait the two hours it would take before I got back to the office.

Oh, did I mention I wasn’t at the office?

I was, in fact, 20 minutes away from the office.

What incredible abilities do I have that I can fix her computer even when I’m out of the office and don’t have time to do the usual Tech Support 20 Questions Q&A (“What are you trying to do? What happens when you try? How long has it been happening” etc)?

Simple: Remote Desktop.

For those who aren’t familiar, Microsoft Remote Desktop lets you sit at one computer and log into another and use the keyboard and mouse just as if you were sitting in front of it.

Although I’m not one to say this about many things Microsoft, Remote Desktop is pretty slick. On a decent LAN connection (even WiFi), it feels just as fast as if you were sitting in front of the original computer.

There’s even a decent Remote Desktop Client for Mac.

But what if you don’t have a laptop with you?

Pop quiz, hotshot, what will you do?

This week I had the opportunity to test an answer, in the form of Mobile TS for Palm by DDH Software, Inc, best known for HanDBase.

When I saw this it struck me as a novelty item, more in the category of “Look what I can do” than something really useful. I had two expectations:

1) “I bet it would be too small” - My Treo 650’s small screen size was not exactly designed to run Windows

2) “I bet it would be too slow” - I have a regular data connection through Sprint, not anything fancy like EVDO.

Well let’s take a look and see who’s right: me or Mobile TS.

When you start Mobile TS, things are pretty self-explanatory:

New - create a new server entry
Edit - change an existing server entry
Connect - connect to an existing server entry

Of course one of the unspoken rules is that I shouldn’t have to read a manual, so I liked the fact that I knew pretty much what to do as soon as I launched it. (For those who like to read, click the “i” at the top right corner for a 3 page blurb. It’s half useful and have marketing copy, but my guess is that the information would help if you got to this point and didn’t know what to do next.)

Right there at the top of the screen is a button labeled “Global Options...” just begging to the clicked, so I happy obliged and this is what I saw:

Here you find settings for the Virtual Desktop. At first I assumed that this had to match the size of your handheld, but as soon as I clicked on the dropdown list I realized that I was wrong. It offers the following resolutions:

320x320
320x480
480x320
640x480
800x600
1024x768

Since I know there is no Palm with a native 1024x768 I realized that you could set this to be larger and scroll around.

I first tried 320x320, the size of my Treo 650 and then I then entered a few servers. It’s fairly self explanatory again:

The important thing to notice here is that you get to choose the port. Why is this important? Well, the default is 3389 (which is filled in automatically) but if you have several computers behind a firewall, you might change the port RDC listens on so you can access all of them. We have that setup where I work, so I knew this would be crucial for me and others.

After I filled in the information and clicked “Connect” I saw this pop up very quickly:

(OK I typed in the name part myself.)

I was able to login, look around using Windows Explorer, launch a few programs off the Desktop of the remote computer.

After a few minutes I decided I was both right and wrong: it is very small. Windows was not designed to run 320x320, and although it resized admirably, some things (like the Open/Save dialog of Microsoft Word) just don’t fit.

BUT... This isn’t something you are going to use for extended periods of time. This is an emergency tool for your tech toolbox for when you have to get in, do something, fix something, retrieve something. And if it doesn’t fit in 320x320, you can change the resolution, as described above.

The bigger question was the speed. So how was it?

Surprisingly good. I tried it both via my Sprint PCS connection and using my local 100MBit LAN via MissingSync. Both were easily usable and responsive.

So would I recommend Mobile TS? Absolutely. Mobile TS gives you fast and easy access to your Windows PC.

How could Mobile TS be made better?

Being able to define servers is great. I use random high level ports for RDC at our office, so being able to save the server names and port numbers will save me time and hassle.

My other suggestions are all about resolutions. There is a “Zoom” setting which I thought would take the steps from 320x320 and 1024x768. It doesn’t, it just takes one step back or a one step forward. That said this may be a limitation of the Remote Desktop Protocol, even the Windows and Mac desktop clients can’t do this.

There would be one way to help this situation: the resolution setting is stored only in the Global Options. I would recommend letting the user define the resolution at on the same screen where they enter the name, host, and port number. The list of servers that a user is likely to use is probably rather small, so it would be easy to imagine that I might setup:

Boss (small) 320x320
Boss (large) 1024x768

so if I logged in and realized I need some more space, I could quickly jump back out and log back in at a higher resolution just by choosing the other server. The “New Server Connection” window (see above) could easily be expanded to show the same dropdown we see now in “Global Options” with an additional entry “Use Default” which would make the connectio utilize whatever setting is stored in the “Global Options” Actually, a better idea might be to put an “Advanced” button next to the “OK” and “Cancel” buttons and let the user choose to override all or some of the Global Options for each connection.

Price: Mobile_TS currently lists for $40. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that price point. My guess is that there is a small segment of the population who will use this, so the cost is higher than some utility that everyone is going to want. But for the IT guy or gal who uses this one time to fix a problem in a hurry remotely instead of having to go back to the office, for the time when you realize that you left your presentation back at the office and need to login quickly to email it to yourself from your office PC, or any of the other emergency scenarios that might come up, the price will probably seem well worth it. The app is well designed, easy to use, very stable, and surpringly fast, even over regular data connections.

There is a demo of Mobile TS available. Like any decent Palm software company, they make it possible for you to download the program directly from your handheld (just choose “Other OS” when downloading the demo and it will lead you to the .prc file).

One last note: I couldn’t find anywhere on the website where it said how long the demo period was. Lots of (Palm/Windows/Mac) software companies make that mistake, not realizing that it is important to potential customers to know what limitations there are on the demo (Is it X number of days or uses? Are any features missing from the demo and only available from the registered version?) Fortunately there was an email contact for support, so I sent an email to support at 1:33 p.m.

I received a reply at 1:42 p.m. Nine Minutes. (And they did not know that I was asking this for a Palm Addicts review.) I find support to be a big issue to me when buying software. If I have a problem, will someone be able to help or am I likely to get ignored? I might have dismissed the speed as chance or merely good timing, except for the footer that came at the bottom of the email which read:

If you have any further questions, please reply. Tech support through email has an average response time of less than one business hour.

To me that says “We take supporting our customers very seriously, and we take pride in it.”

By the way, the demo period is 10 days, and has full functionality.

If you find yourself using RDC, checkout Mobile TS. It’s a very handy tool for your tech support toolbelt.

TjL