Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

The blog about mobile tech

Will Apple Personal Hotspot increase adoption of the iPhone by road warriors?

Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net/IdeaGo

This is a guest post from escapefromcubefarm.wordpress.com

Being a location independent worker, carrying your entire office around with you, there are two vital considerations – the amount and type of equipment carried and the ability to establish an internet connection whilst mobile.  Some hotels and coffee shops still provide slow, substandard broadband which has seen the creation of devices such as the MiFi from 3, a device which creates a WiFi hotspot anywhere you can obtain a 3G mobile phone signal, which can then be used by WiFi enabled devices such as laptops, tablets and smart phones.

One of the new features in the upcoming release of the latest version of the Apple Mobile Device Operating system, iOS4.3, which Apple call Personal Hotspot is coming to the iPhone 4 and 3GS, enabling up to five devices to share the connection securely at any one time.  Personal Hotspot also has a power saving function which automatically switches the hotspot off when not in use to conserve valuable battery live.

Apple cites that a suitable tethering plan is required for this functionality, it will be interesting to see how UK mobile network operators charge for this data use and whether it will form part of the data cap on tariffs when the free operating system upgrade is released later this year.

Since the purchase of my iPhone 3G 8Gb two years ago, the device has truly become ingrained into my daily life, additional functionality like this give me more reasons to upgrade to a newer generation handset and will secure the inclusion of an iPhone in my road warrior toolkit for the foreseeable future.

 

Corporate USB Flash Drives – The new era in Mobile Data Security?

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With equipment loss and theft at increasingly high levels, according to a recent survey commissioned by Dell, “up to 12,000 Laptop Computers were lost weekly and up to 600,000 lost annually in U.S. Airports with 53 percent of mobile professionals carrying confidential company information”, the decision of where to store data is a common one, especially for the mobile worker.

Whilst independent self employed people and smaller business are choosing to store data either within Cloud Applications such as Google Docs, or online file storage services such as Mozy, users in larger organizations traditionally store their data either on their laptop or a USB Flash Drive.

USB Flash Drives have had a bad press, and one can find any number of stories in the press of storage devices being lost or left in public places with vital data on, however, that landscape has now changed with the introduction of the Sandisk Cruzer Enterprise USB Flash Drive.

The device is a self-contained security powerhouse, incorporating independent 256Bit AES encryption, mandatory access control, complex password requirements and a lockdown mode preventing the device from being used after a set number of incorrect passwords.

The real power, however comes when you couple the USB Flash Drive with the Sandisk CMC Management Software. This software integrates with Active Directory, requires no client software, and provides central backup and restore of data on each device once connected to an authorised computer within the corporate network.

Remote termination technology allows an administrator to remotely deactivate and erase a lost device when connected to a computer with internet connectivity. Once the user associated with the lost device is issued with a new flash drive, the new device automatically restores all data from the previous device stored on a server within the organization.  The software can also generate audit logs showing all files copied onto or off of a device for regulatory compliance purposes.

Evernote – Your External Brain

logo Evernote is a feature packed note taking application that synchronises it’s data into the cloud, allowing access from a variety of devices and software clients, such as iPhone, Windows Mobile, Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS X, Sandisk U3 USB Flash Drives and a web interface.

Evernote allows for a variety of different types of notes to be saved in Notebooks, including text, freehand drawings, voice or audio recordings, and photos with searchable text.  Notes can be tagged with keywords or put into separate notebooks to aid organisation and searching of stored notes.

A great example of the power of Evernote is taking a photo of a business card from a mobile device, uploading the image of the card and then being able to search on information such as names and contact details from that business card to be searched upon, no more having big piles of business cards lying around or manual data entry.

For all but the heaviest of users, the free account proves more than adequate allowing a maximum of 40Mb of data transfer into the cloud per month, you can however, upgrade to a premium account at $5 (approx £3.50) per month or $45 (approx £33) per year which increases your transfer limit to 500MB per month and gives additional features such as SSL encrypted data transfer. Each account also comes with an email address so that you can forward email messages with useful information to be stored within the Evernote system for future reference.

The only drawback I can find is when using the application on a mobile device, your note data is not stored locally as well as in the cloud as it is on a non-mobile device, requiring a connection to the Internet to upload newly created notes and view previously created ones.