Real Remote Control from Your Pocket PC

Symantec's pcAnywhere CE lets you control distant systems from your Windows CE hand-held PC.

Peter Wayner

The first palmtop and hand-held PCs (HPCs) had only a few real tasks in life: manage datebooks and juggle e-mail. Until recently, these little machines weren't really good for much else. Now, Symantec is offering a version of its popular pcAnywhere software for the new HPCs that run the Windows CE operating system. The ability to control a distant machine from a very lightweight pocket-size piece of hardware may prove to be the crucial application that endears the little machines to MIS managers and computer technicians.

The new CE edition of pcAnywhere offers a subset of the basic features found in the standard package. Establish a connection and the screen from the host machine also appears on your HPC. If you click on an icon or type on the HPC's keyboard, that information is transparently sent to the main host, which then acts upon it just as if you were using the host's own mouse or keyboard. You can execute p rograms, fiddle with control panels, and even reboot the machine from a remote connection. Everything we tried worked except for Microsoft's Flight Simulator, which demanded to run in full-screen mode.

This edition of pcAnywhere doesn't offer the same file transfer features as the "full-size" version. Symantec says it was aiming for a small binary file to save space. So while you can't transfer files, you can move the clipboard between systems: You can, for example, cut some text on the host machine and then paste it into Pocket Word or Pocket Excel on the HPC.

With pcAnywhere, you can connect to a host over an IP network, a phone connection, or a direct cable link. Even at 19.2 Kbps on our Philips Velo 1, the screen refresh was fairly responsive and usable.

We tested a pre-beta version of pcAnywhere CE that didn't have any of the compression technology Symantec will ship with the final version. This early version of the software was quite steady, although it did exhibit several mistakes redrawing the screen. It was stable, however, and it never crashed either the host or the HPC.

The greatest market for this product may be computer technicians who must maintain servers and help widely dispersed people use software. Such technicians often have to walk long distances throughout a building or campus to handle problems. For them, laptops are often too heavy and bulky. A small, lightweight solution, such as a CE hand-held with pcAnywhere, will give them a useful tool for fixing many problems remotely.

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Product Information

pcAnywhere CE.............................$79.95 host and remote 


..........................................$39.95 remote only

(Requires host with Windows 95 or NT and
 a hand-held PC running Windows CE)
Symantec
Melville, NY
Phone:    516-465-2400
Fax:      516-465-2401
Internet: 
http://www.symantec.com/

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Direct From Afar

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Thanks to pcAnywhere CE, Windows CE hand-held PCs can now let you give orders remotely to your desktop machines.

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Peter Wayner is a BYTE consulting editor living in Baltimore. You can reach him at pcw@access.digex.net .