Concepts you need to understand in order to choose a phone, smartphone or PDA.

(Also see the smartphone overview (PowerPoint slideshow))

What is the difference between a phone and a smartphone, a PDA and a handheld phone?

A simple wireless phone usually offers voice, text messaging (sending short text messages to another phone and receiving them), and usually caller-id and some kind of phonebook capability.

A smartphone offers all of the services of a simple phone but also offers: a mail client tool that allows you to receive and send mail from various mail servers (such as the Rice mail server); a calendar tool that allows you to synchronize your agenda with the calendar tool that you use on your computer (such as the Oracle calendar, Outlook’s calendar, Exchange servers etc); a contacts tool that lets you keep more contact information for each contact than a simple phone’s phonebook, such as addresses, multiple phones etc. and it can also synchronize with your contacts on your computer; finally a variety of other tools such as tasks, notes, files, pictures etc. Most phones also have extra functions such as video and still cameras and audio recorders. All of them give the ability to type input, so one can compose an e-mail reply, fill in contact or even change the content of a file.

A PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) is a somewhat old-fashioned device that used to all the things a smartphone does, except being a phone. So with the term PDA we used to describe very tiny personal computers. Recently we use more and more the term handhelds to describe a PDA that is also a phone. Depending on the model and physical descriptions some of those devices are more phones and less PDAs and some are the opposite.

What type of phone will work internationally?

If you are interested in using your phone when you travel overseas, you need to make sure your phone supports all the different frequencies (“bands”) used in the countries you travel. For example, check to see if the phone you are interested in mentions in the features: “Quad band world phone (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)” or “international roaming”, “Quad-band GSM” and so on.

What different communication links can a smartphone use?

Obviously phones communicate voice data through their wireless connection to the provider transmitter.  Additionally, a smartphone may be able to communicate with other devices in more ways:

If a phone is equipped with Bluetooth wireless technology, it can exchange data with other Bluetooth devices nearby. These could be other phones or computers. You have to go through a configuration menu on both the devices to enable them to detect each other and give each other access to send files to each other.

If it is equipped with Wi-Fi technology, it will let you connect to the internet on any wireless network (or “Hot-spot”) that your wireless card on your computer would also let you connect.

If the phone and your plan support GPRS technology, your phone can use its wireless connection to the provider transmitter to connect you to the internet. That means you can be connected to the internet through your phone line (which is slower) but you do not need to be near a wireless network to do so. You can be on a mountain or in the middle of the sea and if you have phone signal, you also have phone connection.

Finally, smartphones and handhelds can exchange data with your personal computer using a device usually called the “cradle”. You plug the phone in the cradle and the cradle to a USB port on your computer. Then you have to install and configure the corresponding software to your computer, (things like ActiveSync or PalmSync) and configure it to synchronize the data with your device.

What extra services can you get on your phone (text messaging, mail, calendar, contacts, files etc) and which communication link is used by your phone to provide these?

Text messaging: Most phones offer this. It works over the wireless phone line. People can send you a text message using your phone number from their own phones, or they can send you email that you can receive as text message using something like 713-9921327@ tmobile.com  or serak@ tmobile.com or some such address that your vendor provides you.

E-mail: Regarding the physical communication link you need to have acces to your mail: you can either use the phone line connection (via GPRS technology, if you have a “data” plan) or you can use a nearby wireless network (if your phone’s hardware is equipped with Wi-fi capabilities).
Regarding the way the mail tool on the phone works, you can have two types of  solutions:

• a “PULL” type solution, where your mail tool on your phone is setup to talk to your mail server over the internet at intervals that you set, and “pull” down the mail to your phone. The phones and plans that do this are usually described as “internet mail” capable.
• a “PUSH” type solution where your mail server “pushes” any newly arrived mail to your phone at the time of its arrival. To achieve this you need to have access (through your work or other provider) to a special kind of server, called a BES (Blackberry Exchange Server). Rice does offer this type of BES service for a fee.

Calendar: Regarding the physical communication link you need to have acces to your calendar: you can use the USB or BlueTooth connection to your personal computer, the phone line connection (via GPRS technology, if you have a “data” plan) or you can use a nearby wireless network (if your phone’s hardware is equipped with Wi-fi capabilities).
Regarding the applications and different kinds of setup you can use to have your calendar appear and be updated on your phone:

• If you are using a stand-alone, personal calendar that runs on your desktop:

You will need to use the USB or BlueTooth connection to your desktop computer and download and install an application that runs on your desktop (such as Active Sync, or Mobile Center for Windows) and it updates the information on your smartphone. Usually, these programs synchronize the Outlook calendar by default. If you are using another type of calendar tool, you will need one more application coming from the vendor of your calendar tool that will also be running on your computer to help it synchronize the calendar items with your phone. This USB solution is the most antique one, and people are moving away from it as they begin to use organization wide calendar servers as their calendar solution.

• If you are using a calendar solution that is based on an organization server that is not an Exchange server, for example something like Rice’s Oracle Calendar:

You can  still use the USB or BlueTooth connection to your desktop and synchronize with the server via your desktop. Again this is the less convenient old-fashioned way to do it.
If you have a data plan or Wifi on your phone, you can synchronize the calendar on your phone directly to your calendar server via those communications links, if your calendar server can communicate in the protocol called Syncml (Rice’s Oracle calendar does). You will need to purchase an application for your smartphone and configure it to “PULL” updates from your server at any chosen interval. For example, one such application that many of us in IT use is Synthesis’ SyncML client.

• If you are using a calendar that is hosted on a Blackberry Exchange server (Rice has one available for a fee):

You can setup your server to “PUSH” the calendar updates to your smartphone as the changes in the calendar happen (for example as soon as someone adds or changes the time of a meeting). Though this solution seems more dynamic than the “PULL” solution that non-BES based calendar servers offer, it is actually not that much more efficient. A “PULL” solution based on a SyncML compatible server (see above) that checks for updates every five minutes is just as efficient.

Contacts: The same solutions described above for the Calendar also apply to Contacts.
One concern that Outlook users have is how convenient it is to keep the Contacts on an outside the Outlook server, such as Rice’s Oracle server. Though the usage is still easy (one can click on the contact and open Outlook) many people choose to use the USB less dynamic connection for Contacts while they use SyncML for Calendar. Still using SyncML for both is safe, if only because it does not keep Contacts on the sometimes precarious outlook.pst file.

Files: The  way to move files (text files, pictures, Office files etc) from and to your smartphone is by using the USB or BlueTooth connection to your desktop or by emailing them to yourself as attachments.