Friday, April 17, 2009

For the converts, Pocket Informant comes to the iPhone

Pocket Informant from WebIS has been giving Blackberry and Windows Mobile users a solid PIM for the the past 8 years. They have taken that experience and are now offering up a fully featured PIM for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s priced at $13.

Some features include a built-in calendar that syncs over-the-air with your Google Calendars; Franklin Covey and GTD based to-do (Tasks) that sync with the ToodleDo online service; Full blown search of your appointments and to-do’s and contacts; and future sync support for iCal, Things, Remember the Milk, Omnifocus and others.

For people coming over from the Blackberry or Windows mobile who are used to having their calendar and tasks all in one basket, Pocket Informant looks to be a strong contender for the iPhone. It is missing some features that its Blackberry and WinMo counterpart has, but further enhancements are planned, according to the application’s Web site.
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Monday, April 13, 2009

iPhone finds a home in the enterprise market

Market-research firm Forrester on Monday released a report that looks at several companies using the iPhone in the enterprise market. That's significant for Apple because one of the knocks against the iPhone when it first came out was that it didn't have sufficient security for large businesses.

Based on interviews with IT executives from Kraft Foods, Oracle, and Amylin Pharmaceutical, the report explores how the iPhone made it on the list of approved devices for each company.

Todd Stewart, IT senior director at Amylin Pharmaceutical, says the iPhone has become the company's "enterprise netbook," and said the iPhone is easier to support than other mobile platforms. “It took all of three days to get the systems running to support iPhone. We also saw significant costs savings for our voice and data plans by moving to iPhones," said Stewart.

Dave Diedrich, vice president of information systems at Kraft, said he used the iPhone to demonstrate that IT is serious about supporting culture change. The company has about 100,000 employees and Diedrich said that as of January 2009, almost half of the company's mobile users have iPhones. Kraft orders about 400 new iPhones each month.

And Oracle has about 4,000 employees using the iPhone globally, according to IT Vice President Campbell Webb.

While the companies reported positive results overall, they did have some problems. The biggest problem is support for Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007, which didn't always work as expected. A lack of management tools and full support for VPNs were also mentioned as drawbacks.

iPhone OS 3.0 should resolve most, if not all, of these concerns when it is released sometime this summer, helping Apple continue making inroads into the enterprise market.

"Apple is redefining its third industry: first the computer industry, next the music industry, and now the mobile industry," said Ted Schadler, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report. "With iPhone, Apple has breached walled gardens that have long slowed innovation and kept advanced applications from reaching the US mobile market."
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Sunday, April 12, 2009

Help File: Prospects for a New iPhone; Downloading Adobe Reader

By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, April 12, 2009; Page G02

QWhen might Apple ship the next iPhone, and what new features might it include?

AIf I had a dime for every time I got this question, I could buy quite a few iPhones with the proceeds.

But the only honest answer is, "I don't know." The first iPhone and last year's iPhone 3G arrived in July, but Apple doesn't have to stick to that pattern this year.

We can also only guess about the design of a new iPhone. More memory and a video-capable camera would be logical upgrades, but Apple has a history of surprises. (The company also plans to ship a free 3.0 software upgrade for existing iPhones this summer; the original iPhone, however, won't be able to use all of this upgrade's features, and iPod touch users will need to pay $9.95 for it.)

The odds of a just-purchased iPhone being made obsolete by a successor's arrival probably increase as you get closer to summer, so waiting might avoid that -- and keep some money in your bank account in the meantime. But there's little point in freaking yourself out about those chances; if you need a new phone, you need a new phone card.

When I tried to download Adobe Reader 9, Internet Explorer displayed a box that said "Can't retrieve essential parameter (15235.301.265)" before closing on me.

This problem may be the fault of Adobe's too-cute presentation of its Portable Document Format reader. The "Download" link at its site (http://adobe.com/reader) does not start a download but instead takes you to a second page that initiates the file transfer on its own. Internet Explorer, in turn, warns you that the site wants to send a file you didn't explicitly request -- but here, something else went wrong.

You can avoid that by clicking that second page's "click here to download" link or by using a different browser for this task.
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