BT pushes Windows Mobile 6.0

THAT OLD tag line - 'the office in your pocket' - has been dug up by BT for its Office Anywhere offering. It's actually based around HTC's S620 Windows Mobile wireless PDA but it does do VoIP, too.

If you thought picking the right tariff for a mobile phone is difficult, just wait until you try to get your head around the Office Anywhere offering. First off you've got to choose between 250 or 700 minutes as a regular mobile phone.

Then you've got to decide how much data (in megabytes) you will probably use a month if you decide to make us e of your new fangled Office-in-the-pocket phone. 10MB or even 30MB per month sounds a bit low to us. Isn't that something like 333 bytes a day @ 10MB a month?

So the Unlimited tariff @ £54.50 looks like the sensible option. But what's this? BT's implementation of the S620 will definitely have a VoIP client built in. So you can make "unlimited calls to UK landlines via mobile VoIP in Wi-Fi locations."

Now that sounds like something of a bargain. But hang on. "Users can also include a BT Openzone subscription, with pay-as-you-use access charged at 20p a minute, 500 minutes for £5 or 4,000 minutes for £25."

Pardon me, but if you still have to subscribe to a wireless ISP doesn't that sound like those unlimited calls aren't really free at all?

So how come this whole deal is painted as the Office-in-the-pocket? BT says, "The handset emulates the Windows PC experience with PDF, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint viewers making it easy to view web pages, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and other files."

In other words it's a Windows Mobile 6.0 wireless PDA which you could get elsewhere. Such as from Orange with the SPV E600 which like BT's offering is based around HTC's Excalibur S620.

The INQ always likes the bitter irony that BT's own Ad Astral research park contributed towards creating the first Windows wireless PDAs. Yet HTC goes on to make all of the dosh.

BT has a point - nearly 40 per cent of workers are now out of the office for 20 per cent of their time. But they don't want to spend their time worrying whether the Powerpoint file they just downloaded has just blown their entire month's downloaded data quotient. µ

L'INQ Office Anywhere