Smart Phone Market Share

I observe smart phones increasingly appearing in the hands of office personnel, a demographic that appreciates having information always available (and with the financial resources to pay the monthly contract charges). According to Rodger Entner's March 26 NielsenWire post, "Smartphones To Overtake Feature Phones in US by 2011", smartphones now comprise twenty percent of US cell phones, and will be fifty percent of the phones in service by 2012.


-DD

Smartphones

A technologist at my university was showing his new smartphone, which he said allowed him to accomplish many of the tasks that formerly required a desktop computer. The sticking point for many is that data and application fees for a smartphone typically tally near $100/month. These fees are especially daunting because they are a new, continuing household expense that typically does not eliminate Internet service to a home desktop computer or laptop.


Because smartphones do provide mobile workers with tools they can use outside of the office, some employers are considering subsidizing smartphones, or providing such phones to their professional staff. An excellent article on the issues involved for a corporation was Who Should Own Your Smartphones? by Galen Gruman, which appeared in NetworkWorld online March 24.

-D.D.

LibraryKnowledge.com

Library Knowledge is the Web site for Tony Bandy's training firm. The site offers sample training materials which might be useful to anyone wanting to learn about Web sites or information technology.

Note: I attended an event where the presentation equipment suffered a total technical failure, and witnessed Tony cooly continue his presentation with an alternate technology.

-D.D.

Tools For Mobile Technologists

1. Explore http://sosius.com/, a British tool for online data storage and collaboration; http://box.net is a cloud storage company in the US.¹


2. Consider http://www.k7.net/--K7 Unified Messaging provides a personal phone number that serves as your voicemail box and fax number.¹


3. Try http://docs.google.com, a cloud tool that has proven invaluable when trying to convert Open Office to Word, and has sometimes been successful in opening corrupt Word documents that Word2007 could not open. I have also used Google sites http://sites.google.com for simple web pages. Erik Arnold notes that elements of Google Apps such as calendars and documents are easily merged into the created sites pages, something I have not explored.²


4. Look at http://basecamphq.com/--BaseCamp offers single-project management software for free--multiple project management requires a fee. Freshbooks www.freshbooks.com, a cloud-based billing and hours program, has a similar pricing structure.²

_{Today I discarded a heap of literature from the 2009 annual conference of the American Library Association. In the June 2009 issue of Searcher magazine, "Free Tools For Job Seekers" by Irene McDermott¹ and "Tools of the Trade" by Erik Arnold² provided these nifty web sites I just had to pass along.}
-D.D.

Tutorial for First-Time Computer Users

The New User Tutorial http://tech.tln.lib.mi.us/tutor/ was developed by The Library Network (TLN) to give first-time computer users some skills with the personal computer interface without requiring constant oversight by a member of the library team.

-D.D.