One of the challenges faced in undertaking smartphone software and hardware reviews is obtaining screen shots. Our recent review of the Motorola A925 proved to be problematic as at the time none of the generally available screen capture utilities would run on the phone. A solution was however found in Remote A920 from German developer Mobileways. Part of a range of remote control applications for the Sony Ericsson P800 and P900, Motorola UIQ and Series 60 phones, Remote A920 enabled the creation of screen shots for the review, including some which had proved difficult to achieve in the past with on-device screen capture utilities. As the A920 has long since returned to Motorola we have turned to our trusty Sony Ericsson P900 to take a close look at Mobileways Remote application.

What is Remote P900?

Remote P900 is a software application which allows a Sony Ericsson P900 to be controlled from a PC. The application uses an agent on the phone and a PC application to display the content of the P900’s screen. The PC application in turn allows interaction with the P900 via the mouse and PC keyboard, to the extent that the wheel on a wheel mouse acts as a surrogate jog dial, although it is obviously limited to the scroll and select functions.

Selecting Start connects the P900 and PC.

In addition to allowing the user to interact with their phone from a PC Remote P900 has two image capture capabilities. Firstly it can take screen shots in BMP, JPG and PNG formats, these screen shots are by default sequentially numbered with an option provided to define a prefix and suffix for the file name. Screen shots can also be copied to the clipboard.

Saving a screen shot is straightforward.

A second imaging option allows the creation of AVI video files. Some 11 codex options are available with the ability to select the frames per second and video quality.

How would you use Remote P900?

Obviously one use for Remote P900 is to create screen shots for reviews! Clearly any application where screen shots or indeed videos from a device are useful, training manuals for example, would be fulfilled by Remote P900. It is worth noting that Remote P900 has a significant advantage over on device screen capture software in that it can create screen shots and video of very memory hungry applications, such as web browsers. On device screen capture software generally struggles with these applications because they are either closed by such applications (as they free memory to be able to run) or prevent the application from working fully in the first place. An example of this capability, a video of the Netfront Browser, can be downloaded here.

Perhaps the most dramatic use of Remote P900 is as a presentation tool. Running a P900 applications remotely on a PC connected to a projector allows an application to be presented, real time, to a large audience. To assist with this type of use Remote P900 also has a zoom function to display the screen at two times magnification.

Standard and 2x zoom version of Remote P900.

It is also possible to use Remote P900 simply to control a P900 directly from the PC. While this may be of limited benefit it is undoubtedly a use to which Remote P900 will be commonly put.

It’s the Connections that Count.

Remote P900 works well over all of the local area communications options provided by the P900, Infrared, Bluetooth and USB. Obviously the faster the link the better the response on the PC, although several settings are provided to control the amount of data transferred between the phone and PC. This comprehensive set of options includes:

• Compression, where 5 levels are provided with 1 being the highest compression and providing the fastest response
• Whether the display is interlaced
• The color depth of the PC display with options for 16 grey shades then 256, 4096 and 64K color.
• Communication link priority with settings from Low to Very High which determines the priority of the Remote application data compared to other link data traffic
• The rate at which the P900 screen is sampled with settings between 1 Hz and 40 Hz

Does Remote working Work?

Remote P900 is a well executed application which offers a robust solution to two business needs, the ability to demo P900 applications and the need to obtain screen shots and video for off-line use. It is also very probable that Remote P900 will appeal to those who see utility in simply being able to control their P900 from a PC. It is certainly an indispensable tool here at SymbianOne.

Finally it is probably worth noting that the Remote S60 version of Remote has an option which allows the phone to be used as a webcam.

14 day evaluation version of the Remote range can be obtained from Mobileways web site at www.mobileways.de. The software can also be purchased from Mobileways site or from here at Handango.

Web: www.mobileways.de