[General Topics] Menneisyys:
EDIT (01/05/2007): Updated version posted; for the time being (because of the hurdles involved with cutting the article into 10k slices), to http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=1571&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1 only. I'll only update the article below when I have some time for slicing the article.

I’ve long been promising a generic roundup on the ways of accessing desktop PC computers from Pocket PC’s, mostly because there aren’t really usable and/or up-to-date all-in-one articles on the subject, let alone comparative ones.

Getting this roundup ready took me a lot of time (over six weeks): much more than I’ve originally expected. The reason for this was that I’ve made some really serious bandwidth usage and networking model tests so that I can provide you as much objective, comparative information as possible. I also very thoroughly tested the protocols used by these applications to find out internal weaknesses or lack of optimization. I’ve also been in really busy correspondence (asking about every single problem / question I’ve run into in their applications) with most of the authors of these titles; I’d like to thank Carsten Alsted Christiansen and Csaba Tutsek from Danware, Ditta Khan from NetSupport Ltd, Jan Frydendal from MochaSoft and Julie Geer & Heidi Wieland from Citrix Systems for their answering my questions. (The Symantec folks don’t have a working E-mail address and their online chat support (yes, it's outsourced to India), to put it mildly, leaves a lot to be desired. As far as Laplink is concerned, I haven’t received any answer to my mail sent to marketing@laplink.com on 12/11/2006.) Also, special thanks goes to Minakshi Pai of 01 Communique and “Dave” from Parys Technografx for not only answering my questions, but also listening to my recommendations and ideas, some of them having already been incorporated into the most recent versions of these applications.

I’d also like to send special thanks to AximSite god akheron (he was of tremendous help in, for example, hunting for the trial version of pcAnywhere), H/PC Factor moderator (and also well-known contributor on many Handheld PC-related boards / forums) cmonex and forum member TFGBD for their help in their forums.

One of my main objectives with the thorough measurements was to provide an up-to-date bandwidth consumption report. Up to now, to my knowledge, it's only Jason Nieh that has published really usable bandwidth usage reports (I really recommend the articles on his just-linked homepage if you're into the subject). His, so far, most important PDA-related article, "Improving web browsing performance on wireless PDA’s using thin-client computing" (direct link to the article), which was published in 2004, contains pretty outdated and no-longer-topical information. With my measurements, I think I could produce a decent and, what is more, up-to-date overview of the bandwidth usage of current, real Pocket PC applications. By the way, still as far as Jason Nieh's PDA-related work is concerned, I especially recommend his article "pTHINC: A Thin-Client Architecture for Mobile Wireless Web" on a promising initiative. I really hope it will be released some day as a freeware or even commercial product.

First, let me point out that I’ve “only” reviewed and compared “full” remote control solutions in here. This means I have not included multimedia- or scripting-only controllers. They will be reviewed in my forthcoming roundup. That is, if you “only” want to remote control, say, your desktop Windows Media Player or run your scripts when initiated from your Pocket PC, you may want to wait for the next article. (It’s, generally, much easier and much less resource-, including bandwidth, intensive to remote control a multimedia app or server-side scripts with a dedicated application than via a generic remote access application. That is, you won’t really want to remote control for example your WMP via, say, VNC.)

Also note that it’s not here that I have elaborated on the opposite direction; that is, controlling the Pocket PC from a desktop PC (or another Pocket PC). Please read this article for more information on this subject, making sure you also follow the links to my older articles.