This photo shows the HP iPaq 614 Business Navigator alongside a standard-sized PDA and a smartphone, showing how it fits somewhere between the two in size.

In fact, the iPaq 614 is almost exactly the same size as a Palm Treo, although it has a numeric keypad instead of the Palm’s qwerty keyboard. Like the Treo, it has a touch-screen as well.

The Business Navigator part of the device’s name refers to the act that this iPaq has built-in GPS capability and uses Google Maps to show your location and give directions to a destination when travelling.

This means that the device pulls down the map data as needed, instead of storing it on a memory card, and so you need a live data connection to use the navigation feature.

Fortunately, the iPaq 614 supports 3G with HSDPA where this is available, and also has Wi-Fi capability for speedier web browsing when near an access point. It also supports Bluetooth for hands-free calls. A full review of the HP iPaq 614 Business Navigator will appear in a future issue of IT Week.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on April 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

OQO's new version of its Model e2 UMPC is already shipping, and here's a (slightly blurry) picture to prove it. OQO kindly left this model with me to try out when they dropped in to our offices where IT Week Labs is located.

As you can see, the unit is almost indistinguishable from the original Model e2, which we reviewed back in October. It is very slightly heavier (but not so you would notice) and has a new antenna to support HSDPA – the high-speed 'wireless broadband' version of the 3G mobile networks.

The antenna can be extended out from the top right corner of the case, in a manner that makes it look like some kind of spy gizmo that James Bond might have used in the sixties. This is theoretically to boost the signal if reception is poor, but it seemed to have little extra effect when I tried it, and the antenna looks like it might easily snap if the user isn't careful.

From our central London office I managed to get a 3.6Mbit/s connection on T-Mobile, as reported by the Novatel MobiLink Network Connection Manager tool installed on the OQO. Using some of the free broadband speed test tools available on the web, the HSDPA connection was rated at various speeds up to 688kbit/s, which is roughly comparable with what you would see with a 1Mbit/s home broadband connection.

Using the device backed up this finding – it seemed reasonably fast when browsing web sites, but not as fast as you would expect from using a Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection. I even accessed one or two web-based applications and found performance acceptable, if not great.

Of course, get away from metropolitan areas and performance will almost certainly be worse than this, and will drop back to standard 3G or even GPRS the further away you get from a big city. I haven't tested this with the OQO so far, but have frequently found 3G coverage to be patchy outside of London.

This extra wireless capability does not really make the OQO a rival for a smartphone. The device I tested did not have the ability to make voice calls, although there is nothing preventing you from installing Skype or some other voice-over-IP client and using this instead.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on December 10, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Much has been written over the last few years regarding the influence of consumers on new technology, and how products designed for consumers can even end up being used in a corporate IT environment. A prime example is the PDA, but many firms will have discovered workers operating clandestine wireless access points in the office. In many cases, the consumer kit turns out to have many or all of the features of much more expensive enterprise-grade products.

In the same vein, I've just upgraded my home network with some extra storage in the shape of a LaCie Ethernet Disk mini. The device, which doubles as either a USB external hard disk or as network-attached storage (NAS), is designed for the home or small office, but is a low-cost and relatively simple way to add extra storage to any network.

The drive is quite compact, sitting neatly underneath the Linksys wireless router that forms the core of my home network. But despite its unobtrusive appearance, the Ethernet Disk mini is essentially a self-contained server running an embedded version of Linux and equipped with a web-based administration console.

LaCie provides a configuration tool that scans the network and reports the IP address the Ethernet Disk mini is using. Armed with this information, you can then point a web browser at the drive and configure its network name, create a shared volume, and specify users allowed access, among other things.

Although aimed at the home or small office, the Ethernet Disk mini could be used to provide shared storage for a small workgroup or branch office in any company, while the web-based admin console allows it to be remotely configured and managed.

The product is available in 250GB, 300GB and 500GB versions, priced from £129.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on August 23, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)

USB Flash memory sticks are two-a-penny these days, but the OnlyDisk U220 from Netac is notable for a couple of reasons. The company sent me one to try out. 

Firstly, the device is quite small; scarcely wider or deeper than the USB connector that plugs into the PC, and about an inch and a half long. It is also encased in metal, which makes the device feel sturdier than many other products.

The Netac drive also features security protection for files. It is partitioned into two volumes, one of which is password protected and encrypted. The only file visible in this volume is the PASSWORD.EXE program, which must be run to unlock access to its content. As delivered, the password is blank, allowing the user to define one. The password protection also works without requiring administrator privileges, unlike some comparable products I have seen. 

As well as defining a password, the OnlyDisk U220 lets you set how many incorrect password attempts are allowed before the secure volume becomes locked. Netac warns that only its engineers can unlock the device if this should happen, and that this will lead to loss of the device's contents.

While I had no problems with the password system, the drive does seem to have one oddity. Windows users are supposed to close down USB devices  - using the 'Safely Remove Hardware' tool in the System Tray - before unplugging them. However, the OnlyDisk U220 almost always throws up an error message saying it 'cannot be stopped because a program is still accessing it', requiring me to wait several minutes before trying again.

The Netac OnlyDisk U220 is available in 512MB, 1GB, and 2GB versions for £23.99, £29.99 and £49.99, respectively.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on July 28, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2)

The tests of Wyse Streaming Manager are going well, but things are rarely as easy as they seem at first glance. A sales engineer for Wyse walked me through the process of publishing an application so that it could be streamed to the thin client from the server. He made it look simple.

Later, I tried to follow his steps, taking a system snapshot of the test workstation, installing the application (actually the OpenOffice.org suite), then taking a second snapshot, before building an image from the differences between the two.

This captures the files and settings that the install program has introduced – the essence of the application, in other words.

But after making an application AppSet of this, then adding it to the server and trying to access it from the Wyse terminal, I found that nothing happened.

Hmmm. It seems that there is a certain amount of tweaking that needs to be done once the Publisher has sorted the application wheat from the chaff of all the other files on the system, and it seems that this can be highly specific to the particular application.

Looks like resellers or system integrators with a sound knowledge of the Windows Registry will find themselves in demand if sales of Wyse Streaming Manager pick up....

Posted by Daniel Robinson on July 10, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

It seems that VMware's Player has a slight bug, which can prevent virtual machines from accessing USB devices. This happens if the user is running Player while logged into the host operating system of their machine with reduced privileges.

I ran into this issue while trying out release 2.0.3 of the open-source OpenOffice.org suite at home. To avoid conflicts with Microsoft Office, I installed it in a virtual Windows XP system.

However, I found I was unable to copy some sample Word documents onto the virtual machine from a USB Flash drive. Both the host operating system and the virtual machine tried to access the disk. The VM reported "USB device not recognised", after which it became unstable and locked up, forcing me to close VMware player from Windows Task Manager. 

For security reasons, I usually run Windows in User mode, but I found the problem does not happen if I log in as Administrator.

VMware does not offer technical support for Player (which is a free product), but a brief search on the company’s user forum showed that the problem is a known issue. According to a posting from one of VMware's engineers, a workaround is to add users to the "__vmware__" user group created by Player. It is unclear at the moment whether this setting may have any security implications.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on July 4, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

IT Week will shortly begin testing Wyse Streaming Manager (WSM), a system that serves up the operating system and applications to thin client terminals.

Wyse has kindly supplied us with a pre-built server for use in our tests, along with a Winterm V00 terminal – a device so 'thin' it doesn't even have any firmware, just a small amount of bootstrap code in its network adapter and enough RAM to run Windows.

The key features of WSM are that the OS and applications are packaged up and streamed separately, so that workers get access to what they need according to their user profile. It also means that every user can be running from a single server-based image of Windows, making deployment much easier for IT departments.

Wyse gave us a brief demo, and we found it weird to see Windows XP booting up on a device smaller than some books, and without the frantic hard disk thrashing noise that usually accompanies this process.

In the next few weeks, I'll be finding out how easy it is to package up applications for delivery across the LAN from the WSM server.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on June 29, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (5)