Technical interests

Overview
The functional line is being blurred between smart phones, ultra portable devices and PC’s. A couple of years ago smart phones were considered virtually unusable for enterprise applications other than e-mail and messaging and PC’s and laptops were considered unusable for real time mobile communication devices. This is starting to change as the market see’s the emergence of ultra portable devices that are able double as true enterprise productivity devices. This year at CES we are seeing a lot of devices that can be used as enterprise productivity devices but are primarily targeted at mobile communication and entertainment. This provides an opportunity to either build or repurpose these devices and use them for enterprise application presentation.
The opportunity extends both to the device and the application side of the solution set and is the premise for the rest of this document; that premise being that with the new class of enterprise devices opportunities exist for leveraging them against use cases that have traditionally been served by larger sized presentation devices and operating systems.
Examples of enterprise applications that would benefit from use of an ultra-portable device:
EMR applications
MRP applications
Enterprise deployment issues surrounding enterprise application adoption on smaller form factor devices:
Security – this includes security for both the data and the device
Accessibility – meant to indicate access to the IP transport layer and speed of same.
Supportability – Would the device be relatively easy for enterprise IT groups to support and maintain?
Cost – Is the feature / function benefit supported by a good efficiency improvement or revenue model?
Enterprise application usage:
In general if an application is written for use in production enterprises then they are usually meant to be run on a Windows based platform and they are meant to be rendered on a large screen, usually 1024/768 minimum. If they are used on smaller form factor devices then they either don’t render correctly or the screens are so small that they are unusable. This has been the case when trying to use enterprise applications on traditional smart phones and PDA’s. This is coupled with the notoriously buggy nature of these devices.

Issues with ultraportable devices:
Primarily the issue with ultraportable device use in the enterprise is centered around the following two main areas:
1. Input and presentation layer issues – these are varied but mainly center around screen size and input device, touch screen or virtual/real but tiny, keyboards.
2. Lack of ability to run enterprise applications - because of the way that the applications are being rendered, they aren’t viewable or aren’t usable on smaller screens.
3. Limited battery life, ,limited peripherals – batteries run out fast or there is a small amount of peripherals that are usable on these devices.
4. Power and storage space limitations - extremely limited and therefore causes the devices to be heavy and or overheat and or perform poorly.
5. Operating system limitations – They are either too lightweight or are too cumbersome to use on small devices therefore limiting both performance and capability.
Why Google’s Android may be the best answer:
1. The operating system has a base Linux Kernel and can be used easily in conjunction with or for development on many platforms that are already in existence.
a. Unlike