Mobile Management? LogMeIn Wins
Posted on November 6, 2007
5 Comments
Last week I took delivery of my nifty little HTC Mogul Pocket PC phone. After having it just one week I remain very infatuated with it. But it can’t be all fun and games, this thing has to make my life better. One of the ways it will do that is giving me more access to my servers from anywhere I have a signal.
I spent my first few days tracking down software to go about this task in the traditional way. I configured VPN connections and the located Remote Desktop and VNC clients that seem to work well
(Side Note: Remote Desktop is part of Windows Mobile 6. Yet is seems carriers tend to remove it from their phones. Maddening)
While tracking those down I kept seeing references to the LogMeIn service. By running a little client on a PC, LogMeIn gives one the ability to access that PC from anywhere they have a connected web browser. Turns out that includes mobile devices.
It works brilliantly — even the free version. What I really love is the ability to change the scaling on the fly yet still be able to read it. That’s useful when looking at a 1600 x 1050 display from a 320 x 240 device! Also, the panning is much simpler.
Remote Desktop Client
The Remote Desktop client does this interesting panning box that you use to position your viewport on the larger client screen. That larger client screen is forced at 800 x 600 (I think, I can’t find a way to configure it). It looks like this:
(as you can see, I’m using a trial for screen shots. Haven’t decided if this is something I’ll make a habit of)
That blue’ish box in the lower right corner represents the entire remote display and the black rectangle represents what’s being displayed. Drag the box around to change what’s on screen. If I rotate my mobile display to landscape, things adjust as expected (this one’s in “Full Screen” mode):
Full screen mode buys me a bit more space, but I’m still about 25% of viewable in this case (my monitor is out for repair so my home machine is running a CRT at 1024×768 *whimper*). Don’t get me wrong, this is very easy to adapt to… but I can’t really do any sort of scaling with the Remote Desktop client and that gets a bit annoying over time.
LogMeIn
LogMeIn works a bit differently. First I visit their site from the mogul and log in. I’m then presented with a list of my machines (I only have 1 running the client so far). I click that machine name and I’m presented with my “normal” windows domain login.
Once logged in I tap on “Remote Control” and the show begins. I usually start by changing the view to “Scale to Fit”. It’s a bit extreme on my higher res work desktop but it gives me a chance to see what’s up and running and where the windows are. Also works great when you know there’s a dialog somewhere on the screen but can’t seem to pan to it…
This isn’t a great pic, but if you squint you’ll see that’s my full scaled view as I was changing resolution:
From there I usually set the Zoom to 75%. It scales nicely and most text is still plenty readable for navigation purposes. Here’s what that looks like in portrait mode:
What I really dig about the LogMeIn client is the panning or scrolling. You’ll notice that there are no displayed scroll bars or panning box. To slide the screen around you just tap the screen edge in which you wish to travel. In other words, if you want to scroll right, you tap the right edge of the screen. Sounds odd, but becomes second nature quickly.
The VNC Client I found uses a third approach for screen navigation - ye olde scrollbars. All 3 different approaches have their pros and cons. Right now, I like the LogMeIn way the best.
Did I mention I don’t need to futz with a VPN connection to use LogMeIn? That’s a plus too.
As you can probably guess by now, I’m quite impressed by how well LogMeIn works. And this is all Free stuff. LogMeIn Pro adds some nice features but not too many of ‘em are useful from a Pocket PC… and I’m a bit on the fence about the pricing.
Tags: HTC-Mogul, LogMeIn, remote-desktop, vnc, windows-mobile
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Just for reference, there is an unofficial SSH client for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Paul Stamatiou showed how he jailbroke his iPhone and installed the SSH client, nad used it to do various admin tasks on his web site.
Good stuff!
I have PocketPuTTY on my list of software to try, but haven’t needed it yet.