[General Topics] Menneisyys:
VGA support?: as can be seen, there are no products that wouldn't support high-resolution VGA screens. Some of them, however, must be "hacked" into this.

Bandwidth usage group: I've made some really extensive tests to find out how each and every remote control solution uses bandwidth. These tests are, therefore, of paramount importance if you

Have a very expensive (for example, mobile phone-based) connection, where every byte counts

Have a slow connection and would, therefore, welcome the fastest possible solution

To reliably and comparably (!) benchmark the different remote controller solutions, I've done the following:

I've created a Wi-Fi connection (through an external access point to avoid not being able to connect to the freshly booted-in desktop / being disconnected because of locked-out users, as is the case with RDP) between my freshly hard reset (no background tasks requesting information off the Internet) WM5-based Dell Axim x51v and my notebook (an IBM ThinkPad a31p with a 1600*1200 UXGA screen). I've used the x51v for this task because its Wi-Fi applet also lists the sent/received bytes as can be seen in this (received bytes) and this (transmitted bytes) screenshots. For some other measurements (most importantly, ones that did require a pre-WM5 device; for example, the NetOp tests), I've used a direct Bluetooth Personal Area Network connection between my Pocket Loox 720 and my notebook. The Widcomm Bluetooth stack also reliably displays the number of bytes sent (that is, the so-called uplink bytes) / received (downlink bytes). Finally, with one application (PT PO), after finding out the multiplication factor (1.33) between the internal data counter it displays and the real bandwidth usage (the latter is higher because of the additional protocol / communication overhead), I've used the built-in counter available in the main menu, under Connection Statistics (screenshot here).

I've switched the desktop resolution to 800*600 (SVGA) on the notebook (note that a, I've also made tests in UXGA (1600*1200) and, with I'm InTouch to find out the speed issues, all possible, settable resolutions between; b, remote controllers that did override this setting - for example, TSC - have overriden this to VGA (640*480) or, when I've chosen no scroll-mode, even less.

I've automatically scrolled through a looooooong test HTML document (my well-known Pocket PC Gaming Bible Part I without the PPCMag header/footer), with disabled smooth scrolling and ClearType by default (in two another tests, I've enabled them both to see how he protocol handles smooth scrolling events and whether it disables ClearType to increase the data transfer efficiency). To automatize scrolling (and also to reiably find out the rendering time of each and every page), I've used My Macros V2.0 by GoldSolution Software. With this application, it's very easy to simulate user input (in this case, pressing the Page Down key) and waiting for a pre-determined time - please also see this screenshot. The latter also helped me to find out the minimal delay between subsequent page down events for the current page to be completely rendered by the client; in the chart, I've sometimes also noted these results as, for example, "600ms delay" or "scrolling delay". By default, I've used a 2-second delay in SVGA mode; in general, all clients were able to keep it with this (except for the very slow .NET Viewer, where I had to increase this to some 8 seconds).

by substracting the bandwidth usage figures after and before starting the full scroll-through, I got the full bandwidth usage of page scrolling.

Note that, during the scrolling, I've paid special attention to not letting the notebook do any additional animation (for example, animated icons in the system tray or MSN contacts / Outlook mail notifications - I've disabled all these applications) and also made sure the mouse cursor was also hovering over the title bar of Internet Explorer, not displaying any additional tip bubbles and not moving at all.

Also note that these results are, generally, an average of several tests. I've often re-run the tests in order to be absolutely sure I'm right, particularly when discussing the results with the developer.

In subsequent tests, I've repeated the test above, in a slightly modified environment; for example, I've switched on ClearType, smooth scrolling, changed the desktop resolution and/or modified the color depth (in the client); all this to see how modifying these parameters affects the bandwidth usage of a given remote control solution. These additional tests delivered a lot of important results, which I've also elaborated on in the tests.

Generally: 8 bit (with Tight VNC, 16 bit), 640*480 (with RDP) / 800*600 (with everything else), no smooth scroll: the bandwidth usage of fully scrolling down the test page in a highly controlled environment, using the a desktop resolution of SVGA (800*600) (with TSC, VGA (640*480)) and the color depth of 8 bits.

It's really worth checking out the results. In addition to the numeric results (the bandwidth usage in kilo / Megabytes), I've also compared these results to the bandwidth usage of the alternative solutions.