Smartphone Thoughts: Talking with John Starkweather of MED Division at Microsoft - Part 1

Mike: So even with iMate�s minor tweaks, you�re still looking at two months, or two and a half months for them to do their work.

John: Yeah, sometimes it could be faster for lots of reasons. If you talk to them, they could probably give you some reasons why they do certain things certain ways. With MSFP, it wasn�t just the direct push stuff, there were a number of other updates that they put in there. Some things on the accessing front. I don�t know if you�ve noticed, but on all the iMate upgrades, there�s an application in there that enables you to switch ActiveSync between the new RNDIS standard that we have with faster connections, or you could switch back to serial. There are still a few people, and it�s people that work in big corporations that have really rigorous security policies that sometimes have issues with RNDIS. We know of, there�s one big company, it�s the only one we frankly know of, but they�re pretty big. Their policy is you can only have one IP connection � they don�t enable any kind of Outlook web access remotely. They really have locked down what they�re doing. In fact, most of the people who work for that company are so frustrated, all of �em are using redirect or something through hotmail. I don�t get it, cause the IT department, frankly, when you have people sending confidential information to insecure web-based mail clients, that�s not the right approach. But anyway, there are still some companies that have locked things down, so we�ve put the serial solution back in. Frankly there are going to be some other scenarios where serial is gonna make sense for people.

Mike: So if you actually pick that, can you still use ActiveSync 3.8 or whatever? Or do you still have to pick 4.1?

John: Um, good question!

Mike: I haven�t actually tried it.

John: I haven�t tried that either. I think you�re still gonna need to use 4.x something.

Mike: Right. That would be my expectation.

John: Yeah, that�s what I would think too. Actually, I�ll have to try that. That�s a good question.

Mike: It�s an interesting situation, when you launch ActiveSync on the phone, it stops and says, you know what? You don�t have the right version on your PC. Which was pretty neat. I thought I had 4.1 on my laptop, but I had 4.0, and it wouldn�t let me go forward until I actually upgraded it, which was pretty cool.

John: Ahh. There were some, as folks know, there were some ActiveSync 4.0 challenges, and so we�ve done, all of our Dev. Team was really mobilized to ensure that every issue was resolved. They�ve done a lot. 4.1 was a big update. 4.2�s coming, ah, you�ll see it in the next four to six weeks coming available for download, and there�s a bunch of additional improvements. We really believe that PC to Device synchronization, both wired and wireless, can be one of the killer applications for Windows Mobile. There are points when you compare our device to PC synchronization with the Palm OS or with any of the other, Symbian, or the kind of, ah, roll your own software, that our synchronization is actually pretty powerful. But yet, there are still a lot of improvements that can be made that we�re planning to make. You�ll see that over the next, ah, 4.2 there are some good things, ah, some things under the hood, some visible features, we�ll roll into next year with a new version of software; several years after that with some new things. It will be a much more powerful piece of software.