Interview: Getting the message across

IT Week: Who is driving enterprise smartphone deployments?
John Walker: I wouldn‘t say that smartphone demand comes from a specific type of worker or industry. Nowadays, there are just more employees who are not necessarily out on the road or out of the office all the time, but certainly are no longer deskbound. They might be campus based, for example, and go from meeting to meeting. The penetration of mobile devices in Europe is still only three percent, so the market opportunity is huge.
What is Palm‘s smartphone product strategy?
With the latest Treo 750v, Palm is trying to bring its pedigree in the handheld sector to the Windows Mobile platform; we don‘t just have PalmOS devices anymore.
What varies between the two platforms is usability and whatever vendors or operators choose to add to Palm devices. Many people today use a mobile principally for voice and the 750v is designed to be operated using one hand, though it also has a touchscreen and stylus for adaptability. We‘ve made unique enhancements to the Windows Mobile OS, including one interface for email, messaging, calendar and contacts, so it is easy to navigate.
How does Palm compete with RIM‘s BlackBerry and the new Windows Mobile and Symbian-based smartphones now targeting enterprise users?
We are really just starting [with the Treo] in the European market, but in the US, like-for-like quarter-on-quarter sales of the 700w device in 2006 gave us 40 percent market share. Of course, there are lots of other brands and feature-packed devices on the market, but they aren‘t always the easiest things to use in terms of navigability and messaging. We‘ve also launched the Treo exclusively on the Vodafone network to reach a number of very large businesses. Vodafone has an exclusivity period of three months on the 750v, but it is a generic vision going forward and will be available to other operators later. Pa lm will be announcing another product fairly soon.
How important are large screens and keyboards in a smartphone to aid fast data entry and retrieval?
Creating a screen that is small but viewable and usable has always been a challenge, because a converged device is not only about making voice calls but also using data applications such as calendaring and email, and browsing the internet. We believe we‘ve got an optimum form factor in the Treo 750v, however. RIM recently put the BlackBerry Pearl into the market and it is looking at a more phone-like form factor. But people say the keyboard is nowhere near as usable as the qwerty keyboards found on other devices, and making it easy to enter data is crucial.
What sort of new enterprise applications can we expect to see on smartphones?
Messaging remains the key application, enabling users to handle things as though they were in their normal office environment. I don‘t see any other killer application coming down the road that will make a huge difference to that, though we may see a broadening of email use from a mobility standpoint. I don‘t think mobile email has reached its full potential in the European market yet.
There are a number of other mobile applications in various fields, but Palm is in effect a hardware manufacturer that supports two platforms, and PalmOS is owned independently by Access.
Most of the vertical applications being developed for PalmOS and Windows Mobile out there are in fact other email solutions, but stock level checking tools and other applications that let people enter or retrieve data in real time through live connections back to the office are also available.
What is Palm‘s attitude to fixed-mobile convergence and push-to-talk? Will we see a dual-mode 3G/Wi-Fi device in the future?
It is a possibility, but we were not prepared to integrate Wi-Fi on the Treo 750v because Vodafone did not ask for it. I think it is still a bit early for integrated Wi-Fi yet, although a number of devices already have it.
I can understand why people who work in a campus environment might need Wi-Fi, but now you have 3G the requirement to have Wi-Fi for browsing the internet is not really there. Wi-Fi has a growing user base, and there are public access hotspots in hotels and airports, but they are not as widespread as they might need to be.
We introduced push-to-talk in an earlier Palm device, but it is not something that we implemented in the Treo 750v, again because Vodafone did not require it. We have the technology, but it is not as widely used here in Europe as it is in the US.
What can the mobile industry do to make mobile device management easier for enterprise IT managers?
There have been a number of advances in this area recently. Microsoft‘s messaging and security feature pack for Windows Mobile 5.0 is now ready, giving companies live push email from Exchange SP2 and the ability to manage devices from a security standpoint. This can force users to input a PIN, both when they first use the device, and even every five, 10 or 15 minutes. It can also restrict usage and remotely wipe the device.
There are also third-party vendors that allow corporates to customise their devices, for example, to push out certain applications to devices, or to enable or disable specific features such as infra-red or the camera.
How important is the availability of faster 3G and High-Speed Downlink Packet Access bandwidth to the success of mobile devices?
It makes things more convenient, though email is generally just text and that‘s never been an issue with GPRS. With 3G you can download files faster, and do things like make a call while using a data connection simultaneously, which you couldn‘t do over GPRS networks before.
I‘m sure the cost [of 3G data subscriptions] will come down; the more people who adopt it, the more competitive the market will be, and the mobile networks have plenty of capacity for growth. All-you-can-eat contracts of no more than £10 per month for data are also starting to emerge.