I have to confess I am a gadget freak. No surprise to my wife when I bought a $500 3G phone 18 months ago (an HTC Universal). My reason for this expensive gadget was to test both audio and video conferencing with clients. But why would I buy an expensive phone that requires a 3G network to do video conferencing when there is no 3G network yet available in the U.S. (it has been promised for years, but we have yet to see one). To give you an idea of what all the acronyms mean; GPRS is about the same speed as a dial up connection (56kbps), while a 3G network is between 400 -700 kbps.

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But networks aside, with all the press on the Apple iPhone (you have to be living under a rock not to have heard about the product launch on the 29th), the question is, will the iPhone force the network providers to upgrade the antiquated mobile network infrastructure we have here in the U.S..

Upgraded Infrastructure

Will the sudden popularity of (almost 700,000 sold in the first week) a high-end device like the iPhone force the mobile providers to move their infrastructure forward? I think it will. The problems that have been reported with the iPhone users and the AT&T EDGE network will probably force AT&T (and the other mobile providers) to move to where the rest of the world is (3G networks).

Given that almost no one in this country had a 3G phone (except me) for the past 18 months there was not much I was able to test. But lately a few collaboration vendors have begun to look at the idea of web conferencing on the small screen.

Yes, real estate is at a premium on the smaller screens of the cell phone… imagine trying to see 4 head shots and the conference data on a 2 x3 screen, even a high quality screen like on the iPhone. Yet, a number of web conferencing vendors have done just that.

TurboMeeting

Larry Dorie, the CEO of RHUB, which makes a web conferencing appliance called TurboMeeting that is one of the only web conferencing clients that does not require any download. Larry briefed us about TurboMeeting a week or so ago. At that meeting I whipped out my HTC Universal (the iPhone had not been released yet) and tried to get into a web conference with one of my colleagues.

Now my phone is on the T-mobile network, which is a GSM network, but it is also the smallest (least coverage area) and slowest network (GPRS)in the country. Consequently web conferencing, even with TurboMeeting, did not work at GPRS bandwidths. However, my phone also has WiFi and when I switched over to that connection TurboMeeting worked just fine.

Conferencing on the iPhone

About a week later (after the iPhone was released)Larry walked into an Apple store and tested Turbo Meeting on the iPhone. In his own words “I just tested TurboMeeting View Only on an iPhone at the Apple Store (using wifi). It worked beautifully. I was viewing a slide presentation with the host resolution set at 1024 x 768. With the iPhone in landscape mode, I only needed to scroll vertically. Once I moved the window to not show the browser bar at the top of the screen, I did not even have to scroll vertically! The screen was very readable.

When I logged into the meeting, the field for inputting the meeting ID was very small on the window. Once I selected it, the iPhone blew it up and made it very easy to input the meeting ID. The whole experience was not much different than doing it from a regular computer.”

Other Options

Like Larry I also used WiFi to do my web conference. However, about two months ago, I talked with Eric Chen, the CEO of Persony. Eric is using Flash to support web and video conferencing. There are at least a dozen other web conferencing vendors that are also using Flash. Now my device runs Windows Mobile 5, and I have downloaded Flash 7 that is supposed to run on my device, but have not been able to successfully install it, so I have not been able to test Persony web conferencing with Eric on my mobile phone/PDA. If anyone can offer some help on this I would appreciate it.

In the meantime, I expect mobile devices to become even more and more important part of the collaborative environment, and hope to be fully mobile and collaborating on all cylinders in the near future.