For the last few weeks I have been using both the HTC Flyer tablet and the HTC Sensation smart phone, and I have to say I am enjoying the experience a lot.
I bought an iPad 2 earlier in the year, after wanting an android tablet for a while, I thought the Motorola Doom was the tablet for me but after testing 3 devices, where 2 had some serious issues I made the sensible but unwanted decision to get the iPad.  For a while I used it a reasonable amount. But I have to say it has some issues for me.
1. Just holding the iPad for prolonged amounts of time makes your hands hurt the edges are sharp and this makes it awkward to hold.
2. The pen options are limited and a bit inaccurate, I tried several different apps trying to do hand written note and store them easily in evernote. (But it was a bit like hard work)

Anyway I digress, the HTC Flyer I had seen and had a quick play with but always felt it was a bit small for a tablet and too big for a phone!  But it seems after 3 weeks using one I was wrong. The Flyer is a perfect size for hand writtten note taking, the digital pen works really well and is very precise.  There are a few little issues about your hands on screen when you write but you quickly work around that.  I love the fact the Flyer pen integrates directly with evernote so I can hand write directly rather than via a 3rd party app.

The battery life is excellent, not quite as long as the iPad but near enough to not notice the difference.
The Android O/S is very nice and the HTC Sense just improves the experience.  Really can’t recommend those device enough.

Now the Sensation, same O/S and HTC Sense no pen though.  The device is for me just a little too big for a phone, but when you start to type especially into evernote or WordPress as am doing now you quickly appreciate that extra real estate.  The camera integration is nicely done, I have a business card scaning app that works very well.

I have also put some of the IBM business apps on the devices, so connections their social business app, sametime their IF and messaging app and working on traveler their mobile email solution.

Conclusion:
I never thought I would get much out of the Flyer, and felt the sensation would be the device of the 2 I would use most but i was wrong, not by much but i have to say i am really enjoying the Flyer experience.  It is a great little tablet and If I had to spend my own money it would be at the top of the list.
The pen is a well thought out and integrated capability that works so well, and the device fits ok into a jacket old a suit quite nicely.

At the event seeing the power of the ICS portfolio, including Lotus Notes, Lotuslive social and unified communications.

David VIA did a very interesting presentation about the moves within notes and how easy it is to upgrade your apps to xpages and even add mobile access.

Mark now presenting on the options, for on premise, hosted, cloud etc. The options available to Lotuslive customers with integrated partner solutions.
The included in the price Notes client software all for approx £3 per user per month.

Virtual Desktops, well I have to say I have never worked with Virtual desktops before, but now IBM is about to launch it’s Smart Business for Virtual Desktop, so i decided it was time to have a look, well I am on the early adopter program so when the code was released on Friday 17th Nov 2010, I was first in the queue.  After some false starts due to hardware/virtual hardware issues I eventually installed it on my W500 Lenovo Thinkpad, with dual core t9400, 8gb ram and 160gb hard drive.  I have to say the install is very easy, it takes a little while, but after an hour or so you have a working system.  I did the extra software installs takes a few mins.  Then it’s onto adding users, and administrators.  once all that is done you install the client to allow you to setup the gold images (virtual machine) this is very simple, and after 20-30 mins you have a running virtual desktop.  Works on Windows, Mac and Linux support as well as ipad support.  I created a video of the xp virtual desktop running on my ipad and i have to say it seems to work really well although i do prefer windows 7 on the ipad

So go check out the IBM Virtual Desktop for Smart Business or Verde from Virtual Bridges, you won’t be sorry!  next is to try Sametime Unified Telephony on the virtual desktop, but that is for another day.

Well I like to geek where ever and when ever possible, so here we go about 6 month ago I decided I wanted to setup a PBX at home, so that i could control incoming and outgoing calls.  I had 2 cisco 7970 phones, call manager 6, and asterisk installed, with call manager I could ring each of the phones from one another no problem, from Asterisk I could call xlite and 3cx soft phones, but couldn’t get call manager to talk to asterisk and vice versa, I read and followed online guides but none worked, so I decided to stick with asterisk as it’s free and see if I could get the 2 7970 phones to work against it.  Well firstly i tried to get the sip firm ware from Cisco thinking I needed that but no luck as you need a contract which I don’t have.  So I then found details on how to use SCCP phones against Asterisk, so I decided to try that well after about a day of playing the phone registered and I thought all was good until i picked up the handset and no only didn’t I get any lights on the phone I also didn’t get any dial tone.  Damn it, i had what at the time seemed to be a brainwave, I asked a friend / colleague at Cisco I have worked with before for the sip firmware which duly arrived.  So how do i upgrade these phones?  well found a site that seemed to be pretty comprehensive so I started and after about 30 mins things were not going well, the tftp server didn’t seem to be being seen by the phone, and as i followed the instructions things just went from bad to worse!  I found out later that the POE i was using doesn’t work for firmware upgrades so that was phone 1 bricked (£500) down the toilet, so I found a website and ordered an external power supply.  Feeling a little unhappy but hoping this was the answer to my issues i plugged away and found some other info on upgrading the phones this time mentioning you needed to plug them in.  So this seemed like a good start, I got the 2nd phone onto the network and attached it to the TFTP server and after a reset it started to load the firmware.  Hurray at last some progress, after the upgrade the phone had almost no function and no dial tone, so i thought maybe I should try and get the old firmware back on the device and try again.  The process for upgrading the firmware was such a pain and after several hours of trying I now had 2 very delightful bricked Cisco 7970 phones.  At this point I decided this wasn’t going quite as well as i hoped so I decided to try the free version of 3CX pbx.  I got it installed and running very quickly, and was soon, fully working with a softphone.  I then looked into what was possible and setup 2 sipgate accounts for 2 lines coming in/out, and decided i needed a hard phone, after some arguing i told the girlfriend I was going to buy a phone and her reply was what’s wrong with those ones, I replied they are dead, and the coversation when something like!  Why did you break them?  It wasn’t intentional I was trying to upgrade them and it didn’t work, so you want to buy another one to break?  No this is a special one designed to work in this setup I was changing the other phones to try and make them work when I broke them.  Anyway after some heated discussions I bought a linksys spa-921 single line phone, a little complicated to setup but the 3cx website is very good for this and quickly had a working hardphone.  As i was browsing the forums i found some info on a skype gateway for 3cx, how cool I thought, so i downloaded it and installed it, I setup call routing and a new skype account so now friends and family all over the world can use skype to call even when we are not online as the phone rings, and I can make calls using skype user names, without having my desktop pc on.  very cool.  I also found a 3cx softphone for android which runs the battery down on the phone fast but was very easy to setup and worked well.  I then decided that all this was pointless unless i could get the home line to work off this system too so I looked into a voip gateway and the only one that was cheapish and seemed to do what I wanted was the linksys SPA3102, so i ordered one, it arrived and after some playing about and the purchase of a very cheap wired phone i got this up and working so now my old laptop runs 3cx against 2 sip lines skype and my home line delivers call

Apple iPad has been out for almost a year now but is it the best of the tablets available or coming?  If the apple iPad is the best today, then should you wait for the new version.  I have been doing a lot of investigation on the subject and found this to be the case!

The Android tablets come in a number of flavours, those with 3G and those without, if you get 3G then you get market place if no 3G then you have to hope the manufacturer of the device provides some kind of online app store otherwise you will have issues getting new apps on your device.  Good news is that being open the Android platform is very flexible and in theory supports flash fully but that seems to be questioned on some of the information i have seen so be aware.  The ipad starts at £429 for a basic 16gb wifi only version, but you can get a similar android device for about £150, so why would you spend the extra on an ipad?  Well from what i have seen and this includes some hands on experience the Android tablet devices just aren’t quite there yet for what ever reason, it may be the operating system itself that has the issue. I was very excited the other day to find a Samsung Galaxy Tab in a local electronics store, I have been looking forward to this device as I really wanted an Android tablet and from what I had read this was the no1 contender to Apples dominance so far.  Well at first I have to say i really liked it looks nice feels nice, very bright display, usual apps, 3G, wifi, so you get the Market place, and even angry birds is now available for android is this the perfect device?  then it all kinda went south.  First thing was the keyboard, when in portrait mode it works well looks nice and has a little vibration as you type which i really like, I opened a browser and I typed in the url to this site and after www.jon the tablet froze i pressed the n key a few times and others but nothing, then just as i was thinking I had broken it, and I should walk away quickly and deny all knowledge, I got a string on n’s going across the screen as it caught up with my inputs.  So I deleted these and completed the address, I clicked enter and off it went the response was quick and the site was displayed in just a few seconds.  I turned the device to landscape as it’s easier to view the site that way.  Apart from the freezing issue which I have since found out to be a known issue in general, I found one other thing that was a bit upsetting, when you go to landscape the keyboard is still the same size as it was in portrait so you get a tiny keyboard and a big space either side, making it very hard to hold and type.

I see viewsonic have released a 7″ and 10″ tablet the former has 3G wifi etc and the latter is a dual boot Windows 7 home premium and android 1.6, as it runs on an atom processor the 1.6 version of android is all that supports that platform.

I have to say that as much as I love android and it is definately getting there there are currently just a few show stoppers for me, including the fact the corporate network doesn’t support the device but with new versions of LMC and Traveler due to support Android very soon that will no longer be an issue but if I was buying today the choice would be the iPad, however the ipad is also missing some features, hopefully most of which will be fixed in the next release of the device in 2011, the one thing I really like about the iPad is the keyboard, because apple have gone for the 4:3 format it means that you can have a basically full sized keyboard and still see the screen, this makes the device in my mind the better business solution although I hope before the end of Q1 2011 and the release of Apples gen 2 Ipad that Android and the Android tablet vendors will have sorted the issues with the platform and delivered a 4:3 device with a full sized keyboard.  I genuinely think the keyboard is the most important peice of the puzzle and it’s the reason netbooks have gone from a 7″ to 10″ because the 10″ device while still very small and portable has a decent size keyboard, I have an asus eeepc900 and it’s a great little device but the small keyboard is the one thing I would like to fix.

Well I hope this has been useful and informative and happy shopping, if you do decided to go for a tablet I think which ever platform you go for you will be pleased with as they all have their own limitations, but in general they off a great set of capabilities and features never before seen on a device of this size which this level of interaction, and remember there is no perfect device yet!  Lets see what Blackberry can offer with it’s playbook!

http://blog.laurence.id.au/2009/08/cucm-trixbox-linksys-spa3102-part-1.html

Well a few weeks ago I was lucky enough to get my hands on the Apple Ipad for a week or so, Work bought one for testing & demoing our technology, and it gave me a chance to understand why apple made some of the decisions it made, and have some fun in the process, it also gave me the idea for the next generation office devices.

Apple actually have been very thorough even though they seem to have missed some obvious stuff.  So this is my reasoning, most of the other tablets are 16:9 or 16:10 but they have such small screens that the keyboards are small or stretched leaving very small amount of screen to work with, so the ipad’s 4:3 means that only half the screen is taken up by the keyboard and it is almost a full size keyboard so typing is really easy, so the 4:3 is actually a really nice idea.

No camera’s was that an over site?  Then I thought about it how many people do you know of that don’t have a mobile phone with a forward facing camera?  and the ipad isn’t exactly pocket sized, so the way i see it now a forward facing camera is not a big issue as I don’t think it would get used much but, a rear facing camera would be nice especially with facetime, but more importanly the ability to use enterprise video conferencing capabilities from a small mobile platform, now that makes real sense.  Iphone 4 and other devices with a front facing camera needs to allow proper business video conferencing to use it to make it truely a fantastic business device.

I also find something very interesting, all the new devices we use have some basic similarities, most devices now have soft keyboards, yet when we buy IP phones most if not all have hard keypads, but why?  Surely that makes no sense, we are a tactile generation, we like touch screens, so why would you limit a device by giving it a small screen and a keypad, why not have a big screen that helps navigation, potentially it allows the screen to deliver capabilities yet to be seen on the desk phone!  I know a lot of people like a handset, so you can keep that bit, or you could go dect or bluetooth headsets, but either way the phone base needs to deliver more than just phone capabilities, it has to add value!  What I would like to see is a desk phone that has a browser, which would allow me the ability to access web conference on the device, I can then continue to use my laptop to work while in the conference or add value to the conference with the ability to look up information without loosing the conference window.
So what would be the other functionality these new generation phones should deliver?

1. So I have already talked about Web conferences, this for me is a given.
2. a visual listing of members of a conference call!  Very simple to do using something like rss as a feed to the phone from the conferencing service, so it needs a feed reader.
3. That leads us onto corporate news information, not logged in to the device, you get generic posts, log in and you get specific targeted posts (a portal on your phone).
4. What else, Instant messaging allowing click to call from a buddy list on the device.
5. …

So we now see that a desk phone is more than just a phone so maybe the format of the device is wrong?

Lets take the tablet as an example,(iPad, the new Blackberry Playbook, the Samsung Galaxy etc) nice screen size, has a dock capability, some with cameras, some without, no handset, but could use an dect/bluetooth device.  Well what are we missing here, these devices are perfect what they all need is a docking solution that lets you connect to a handset, a camera, QoS network!  we could have a docking station that turns this mobile tablet device into your new desktop device you simply dock and it is now your phone, browser, your company portal, your information centre.  so what’s missing?  Well a device at 45 degrees is not great for much more than typing numbers into to make a call so what about a keyboard that turns on when you enter a field that requires text input, but that takes up desk space so better still a laser keyboard that appears when you need it! That way you have full desk space until you need to type and no keyboard to move.

So have I just created the next generation unified business platform?  a mobile device that becomes the centre of your business world?

Let me know what you think or any additional capabilities this device needs.

So I work in Unified Communications and have done for the last 4 years and have been looking at the options available for a user of UC, the thing that always seems to get missed in the UC space is the last 3ft, ok the large Telco vendors like Cisco, Avaya etc will happily sell you a very funky IP phone, and that is great but the real point about UC is mobility so we are talking soft client control, routing calls to where I want them, when I want them.  We have the Softphone, a great invention,  I can now take calls on my laptop, but why do they always seem to look like the IP phone they replace? I don’t know how to use the IP phones in the office so why do I want that on my laptop?

Another thing about UC is it should be truly integrated, a single client for contacts, voip, video, and telephone calls, and why not have it integrated into the applications I use everyday like email, calendar etc.  Now we are getting somewhere!  or are we?  Most softphone clients require windows, now don’t get me wrong windows 7 is not a bad operating system, but with the recession and other reasons businesses are looking to save money is Windows the next generation platform for business?  Or are we about to see a shift to other technologies like Linux?

Well what ever solution you decide on today it needs to be agnostic, user choice is the future.  I have a Mac, I use Linux and good old Windows, so what functionality do I get?  Well in the right solution the answer should be the same.  The same user experience the same functionality.  Well we have 3 different phone systems I’m on the TDM system but we haven’t fully rolled out IP phone systems, who cares the solution should deliver the same result whether you are on old or new technology and which ever platform.

So that leaves with the final issue of the distance between the computer of what ever type and the squishy thing yelling at it ‘CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?’  This is why some UC projects fail because they have failed the most important factor ‘the user’!

The User will go for the simplest route to make a call if your deployed solution is right then that will be the answer and congratulations you have just saved your company loads of money, but if it’s not then the user will find an alternative which may well cost the company money.

So how do we make UC sticky, so to speak, we make it so easy to use from where ever they are working that it just makes sense to use it, we give them devices that enhance that experience and we make it so easy to use all of the functionality with out the use of a thick manual it has to be intuitive like turning a 2 way call to a 3,4,5,6,80 way call, using simple drag and drop or multi selection and click to call.  So lets start with headsets, and the only ones I’ve really tested are from Plantronics, but they come in all shapes and sizes with and without cables and although the cabled headsets are really good quality they loose that element of flexibility.  I have tried a number of them and had feed back from other users and it seems you can segment users into 3 categories when it comes to headsets,

1. users who really like walking about with a little blue flashing device on their ear and they wear it religiously

2. The i’m on a call user who only wears it if they are on a call

3. The why do I want one of those they look silly user

I am definitely a 2,  and I use headsets in the office from my mobile at home on my land line and of course I use a headset when I use Sametime Unified Telephony (my Softphone), but to be honest when I am working from home I have an office, I call it my office but the Girlfriend would argue that point!  Anyway I digress, when at home I often need to be on conference calls and as great as a headset is I sometimes like to have the conference call on speaker phone, and to be really honest I go on a lot of calls that don’t require any input from me so speaker phone is perfect.  But a good quality speaker phone is expensive so I built this:

A 3cx IP PBX on an old laptop connected to an SPA3102 which is a pstn gateway to my home land line, then I have a number of clients from my spa-921 deskphone with speaker phone capability to my little HTC android device with the 3cx softphone installed ( wil talk  more about this another time)

But it’s a lot of effort to get that running but was fun for a geek like me !

So this is where the USB speaker phone comes into it’s own, now I know of at least 4 vendors making these little babies, Plantronics, Polycom, ClearOne and Yamaha, I’m sure there are others.  I currently have a Polycom C100, my one is quite old now but it works well, and does exactly what it says on the tin.  Then we have Plantronics, I have seen this device but never used it, so can’t comment on quality etc yet, Yamaha have a new device which is like a small tower block, we are waiting for a demo device to arrive so we can test it, and then we have the ClearOne now these guys have a background in specifically audio capabilities so you would expect some very cool capabilities in their devices, and you’d be right, the chat50 has a 2.5 mm jack so you can actually bridge your mobile or deskphone into a call (Believe it or not), all the speaker phone have the usual 3 control buttons some have a few extra but most just have the standard 3 buttons for volume up and down and mute nice and simple.  From it audio heritage ClearOne devices all have echo cancellation which can actually remove the girlfriends Vacuuming from your conference calls (as long as you have a dyson) not that I have this problem I’m always the one doing the vacuuming.

ClearOne don’t just do personal USB speaker phones they do a selection including one that can be daisy chained to give you 2 devices on the same call so using your softphone you can become a small meeting room conferencing phone.

So like we have today with projectors where you have to book then out for your meetings, we could have tomorrow with conferencing solutions.