[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Last but not least: most of the tangible information is in the 120 kbyte-long comparison and benchmark chart. In the non-chart-based part of this review, I only give a terse, broad, but in no way thorough overview of what the reviewed applications are all about and how they compare to each other. It’s also in here that I elaborate on the underlying protocols (RFB (in VNC), RDP (in Terminal Server/ Services aka (Microsoft) Remote Desktop)), the way you can decrease bandwidth usage (which is of paramount importance when you use, say, a non-unlimited mobile phone-based connection) etc. Most of the comparative, real, quantitive information and hundreds of screenshots (many of them functioning as a mini-tutorial showing how the mentioned/ discussed functionality can be enabled in a given application), however, are in the chart. Therefore, make sure you, for example, open the chart in a maximized browser window. If you have an UXGA (1600*1200) or an even wider screen (WUXGA, for example), then, you’ll be able to see all the 18 columns at once while still being able to read the text. With lower-resolution screens, you’ll end up having to scroll horizontally to be able to read all the information (and many state (W)UXGA screens are useless and should be avoided... :) ). Sorry for that: comparison / feature charts like this are still the best, the most compact and reliable way to compare products and list all their capabilities, unlike plain text-approaches many other reviews use. Note that I also thoroughly explain below how the chart should be read in a later section.

1. Introduction

The aim of remote access applications is the same: to provide you access to your desktop computer(s) (in here, I'll refer to them as "remote desktops") when you’re away from them. You can control them from your client PC (or, in this case, Pocket PC) directly. That is, you can see the remote desktop on your (local) client PC (Pocket PC) as if it were running locally, right on your client and not somewhere else on the Internet far away. With some really advanced clients, you can also do direct file transfers, clipboard synchronization (for example, if you have a loooooong e-mail address in a local file / database on your local client (Pocket) PC, you only copy it to the local clipboard and, then, just synchronize the clipboard so that it also becomes available on the remote clipboard; this way, you can avoid having to re-enter it on the remote desktop by hand), remote administration and Personal Information Management (PIM) data (calendar, contacts and even mails) access in addition to “plain” remote controlling.

There are, basically, two kinds of remote access / control applications: 1. Web-based ones and 2. non-Web based ones.

In general, the former

are much easier to set up on both the server and the client (except for, maybe, RDP-based, already built-in solutions like the RDP-based "Remote Desktop" in Windows XP Pro and Terminal Services Client (TSC) in most client-side Pocket PC’s). In most cases, when you plan to install the server on your desktop computer you want to access remotely, you just navigate to the homepage of the developer and let it download a server to your desktop PC, which, then, you just install (the latter is, in most cases, just clicking the “next” button and entering the username and/or password you’ll want to use). Furthermore, as far as client installs are concerned on any desktop PC or Pocket PC you come by, you just navigate to the above page and try to log into your remote PC. This will trigger a fully automated client download and install.

give complete freedom to the subscribers in that they connect to their remote desktops really easily, independent of the networking model of their desktop (that is, these services even work over firewalled and/or severely restricted connections). All you need to do is making sure your computer you want to remotely access has Internet access. No need to configure any firewalls or to even know the actual Internet address of your computer, the central Web server takes care of all this. All you need to do is logging into your central account in the central Web server: it will connect you to your remote desktop.

That is, for a non-IT-professional, these kinds of remote access solutions are preferable to the other group, which, in general, requires manual server download, installation, configuration and, in cases, tuning. This is why, first, I discuss the first group.