Thursday, July 12, 2007

The evolution of thin clients

IDC expects enterprise converged mobile device shipments to reach 63 million units worldwide by 2010, up from 7.3 million in 2005. Wow! This will be over eightfold of 2005 within half decade. The Research In Motion's (RIM) BlackBerry has a firm standing in the market, Microsoft, Motorola, Palm, Nokia and others are joining the competition and therefore, RIM's position is being challenged (NWA Staff 2006).

The launch of iPhone has been a success to Apple Inc. Most of financial companies has forecasted the high volume of sales of iPhone in 2007 and 2008 (Nystedt 2007). However, after a while, it is found that iPhone is engaging with the security issues. Anyway, Apple is responding to the issues and providing the solutions.
IDC expects enterprise converged mobile device shipments to reach 63 million units worldwide by 2010, up from 7.3 million in 2005. Wow! This will be over eightfold of 2005 within half decade. The Research In Motion's (RIM) BlackBerry has a firm standing in the market, Microsoft, Motorola, Palm, Nokia and others are joining the competition and therefore, RIM's position is being challenged (NWA Staff 2006).
The launch of iPhone has been a success to Apple Inc. Most of financial companies have forecasted the high volume of sales of iPhone in 2007 and 2008 (Nystedt 2007). However, after a while, it is found that iPhone is engaging with the security issues. Anyway, Apple is responding to the issues and providing the solutions.

The other issue is about a ‘thumb down’ story, a Colorado man had his thumbs surgically whittled to sharper points so he could dial his Apple Inc. iPhone. This story could be found in Snopes.com. Finally, the suburban Denver monthly that ran the piece admitted this was a joke (not true) recently (Keizer 2007). It gives me an insight that these gadgets are too tiny to be operated or not very practical. My company has purchased a number of BlackBerries for loans since 2004. Throughout the years, a few different models have been brought including 7100, 7200, 7700, 8700 series and…). I do not know which model is the best or the worst but the most unpopular one. Why? Users are preferable to loan the larger one with proper keyboard rather than the smaller one with combined phone and QWERTY layouts (e.g. 7100g). In other words, the popularity of the model is determined by the user friendliness rather than the outward appearance.

Last month I went to the Microsoft TechEd 2007 Hong Kong conference. Many IT companies had their booths there to sell their latest technologies and products. Thin clients and Blade PCs were the popular products. One product which is comparatively more impressive (not better) in my mind is a wireless touch panel with AJ45 network interface card support. Without doubt, this is actually a ‘colourful dump’ terminal with Wi-Fi support. Doctors would really find it very useful to his work.

Finally, I want to share my view that thin clients or any digital devices must be well designed with practical use in terms of functions and human factors.


References

Keizer, G 2007, 'iPhone 'thumbed-down' story waves facts goodbye', ComputerWorld Hong Kong Daily, posted 14 August, viewed 19 August 2007, <http://www.cw.com.hk/computerworldhk/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=449526>.

Nystedt, D 2007, ‘Taiwan hit by iPhone craze’, Computerworld Hong Kong Daily, posted 29 June, viewed 23 August 2007, <http://www.cw.com.hk/computerworldhk/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=438634>.