Basically I’m a Windows user with an iPhone. I’m using this phone as a business smartphone. Yes, a very strange combination indeed :-). I want to write about some cases when iPhone can be extremely useful and other cases when it can be extremely annoying.

Recently, I had a typical situation in the outsourcing world. A customer called me and explained that he had had a problem with the application on one of his computers. Of course, he wanted to have that issue fixed ASAP. It turned out that I had to find the problem on his machine. Unfortunately, I was far away from the office. What’s more, I was far away from any computer or Internet connection. Well, working for the company that has quality as its primary goal obliges. It obliges you not to ignore customers’ needs. Of course, I don’t have to waste an entire weekend to travel to the office just for the customer’s convenience. It wasn’t an emergency situation. But I thought I could easily fix the issue because it seemed rather easy. Well, it’s always better to have the customer very happy than just pleased.

So, I decided to figure out a quick solution. I knew that I could connect to the customer’s computer through VNC. Of course, I thought about my iPhone because it was the only way to connect to the Internet. It has brilliant Internet access so why not give it a try. I fired AppStore application and searched for VNC clients. I chose the free application “Mocha VNC Lite” from the few choices I had.

It has some limitations but first I wanted to try if it made any sense at all. The application has only under 400KB but I didn’t have HSDPA connection so downloading took about 1 minute with plain EDGE connection. OK, when I had the application I had to enter some configuration data for connection. This is where the glitches came in the way. Of course everything I needed, I had inside e-mail on company’s Exchange account. The current version of iPhone software (2.2.1) doesn’t allow you to search e-mails. OK, it took me some time but I found the e-mail with VNC information. At that point, what we get is the best part of iPhone’s annoying features. The current version of iPhone software doesn’t allow you to copy and paste! Dohhh! So I had to write it down on a piece of paper. Tragedy, don’t you think? Why have I mentioned the current software? Because in a just few days (June 17 actually) all iPhone users will be delighted with the whole new OS 3.0. It will have the cut/copy/paste functionality as well as searching for anything stored on iPhone or e-mail servers. And much more. When I have it installed, I will write just about the changes.

Back to our VNC.

VNC connection pannel.

I entered the IP address and password and… it worked. I had Windows inside my iPhone :-). The refresh rate was quite good even with EDGE connection. I could use the pinch gesture to zoom in/out the desktop. The lite version of Mocha VNC doesn’t have some features such as the right mouse button emulation but I didn’t need them. I opened the log file and found the problem.

Finding the problem within text log file.

I just needed to run MS SQL Management and do some SQL magic. The problem was temporarily solved. The customer was happy over the weekend and on Monday the team could fix the issue permanently.

Logging into MS SQL Server.

The whole operation beginning with searching for VNC client to disconnecting with the VNC session took me about 10 minutes. It is not too much private time just to make the customer really happy.

It seems that iPhone can be really useful in the outsourcing business. Of course, you could do this with any other mobile platform probably but using an iPhone is such a pleasure that I will never try anything else in the nearest foreseeable future ;-).

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