The Hindu : National : And now, smarter phones

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Nov 09, 2005

National

National

And now, smarter phones

Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore: Smart phones just got a wee bit smarter. Now they can run a host of interactive office applications, fuelled by a solution from US-based SCO Group, providers of the `original' Unix software operating system.

SCO's `Me Inc.' platform had its India launch on Tuesday during a user conference in New Delhi.

Initially, the new features will work with the Palm `Treo' smart hand held; and soon with `Blackberry' phones and all mobiles which have either the Symbian operating system or Windows Mobile, ticking away, under the hood.

In a telephonic briefing for The Hindu , Tim Negris, SCO's Senior Vice President (Marketing) said that once the `Me Inc.' software was ported on an `edge processor — the computer on the edge of the host network — phone owners could download a small chunk of software to get going. The phone service provider need not do any thing extra. The digital services include the ability to `shout' (capture, communicate and share multimedia images), `vote' (participate in real-time opinion polling and market research) and deploy `action' (a mobile way to plan, delegate, track and report on the progress of projects.)

The last is particularly likely to appeal to executives who can now do on their mobiles the sort of executive functions for which they hitherto lugged a laptop computer.

SCO's Chief Technology Officer Sandy Gupta said the company's Delhi-based development arm would be increasingly involved in future upgrades of `Me Inc.' that would enable remote management of systems back in the office.

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