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SymPhone Organizes and Takes Calls: Page 3 of 4

The Client

The SymPhone Client is unique in a few ways. Rather than dialing with the tiny stylus that comes with the PDA, you can exercise your fingers with a full-screen dial pad. Additionally, the phonebook is integrated with Microsoft Outlook and is only a touch away from the dial pad.

Under Options, SymPhone displays such current settings as IP address, subnet mask, default gateway and DNS servers used by the PDA. This is very helpful when trying to troubleshoot networking issues. Most vendors only provide a view of your association and signal strength with the access point.

SymPhone takes another step toward making mobile life simpler by providing a profile option. We configured two different profile SSIDs: one for the lab and one for the home. Rather than change the network settings when we moved from lab to home and back, we only needed to change the profile.

With SymPhone, you also can specify power-up behavior as well as walkie-talkie and intercom settings. The power behavior settings let you start SymPhone when the PDA is powered on, or you can start it manually for more control over the applications running on your PDA. The walkie-talkie mode is half-duplex, and it might be useful for PDA-to-PDA conversations. The intercom feature, which is similar to that provided on NexTel cell phones, comes in handy if you want to page all the PDAs in your network simply by pressing a button on your PDA. You can even indicate what personal information is displayed to the other party's PDA when calls are made. Plus, SymPhone indicates whether a Call Server was located and lets you configure a Connector's IP address with ease.