Product Central

After a teaser campaign that mentioned integrated Zoho web-based services and a 'popular Microsoft product', Zoho has unveiled Zoho Projects 2.0, which brings together Microsoft Project and a collection of Zoho's online collaboration services.



Billed as 'the social way to get things done', Zoho Projects claims to go beyond traditional project management by allowing teams to plan projects in Microsoft's application and use Zoho's services to manage them. Among the Zoho elements are a centralised file store, a project calendar, a wiki, chat rooms and forums, and the ability to create a project-based intranet.

If you want to try the system (and we'll be reporting further on it), you get one free project with unlimited users when you sign up.

To Battersea last night for Samsung's much-teased 'Unpacked' launch. I was hoping for the company's still-upcoming Android-based i7500, but the main event was the unveiling (with much fancy holographic projection, but thankfully no Wings soundtrack) of the Jet.



Samsung Jet: OLED screen, 800MHz CPU, TouchWiz 2.0 UI, Dolfin browser, built-in MS Exchange support.


The Jet is something of a hybrid, notable initially for its 800MHz CPU and 3.1in. AMOLED touch-screen with WVGA (480 by 800 pixels) resolution, 16.7 million colours, 180-degree viewing angle and 40 percent less power consumption than an equivalent TFT display, according to Samsung. The reason for the low power consumption, of course, is that TFTs need backlighting whereas OLEDs do not.



Samsung says the Widget platform will be opened up in due course.


Rather than Android, or Windows Mobile or Symbian, the Jet uses Samsung's proprietary OS and TouchWiz 2.0 user interface (previously seen on other touch-enabled Samsung 'feature' phones). This is an upgrade, with multitasking support, access to multimedia features via a six-sided cube, accelerometer-driven functions and something called Smart Unlock where you can unlock the phone and fire up a previously selected application simply by drawing a letter on-screen. There's no open application development platform or app store a la Android Market, but you do get Widgets that deliver things like news, weather, search and quick access to social networking sites. In the Q&A following the launch, Samsung repesentatives said the company was planning to open up the Widget platform in due course.

So far, so 'fancy feature phone' — but Samsung is touting the Jet as 'Smarter than a Smartphone'. How come? Well, it has a WebKit-based browser called Dolfin with built-in Flash support and 'one finger zoom' functionality. It also comes with Microsoft Exchange support built in, so if you're a business user who needs no more than Exchange email and a browser, Jet will handle the dull stuff and give you a lot of fun after hours. A file viewer also lets you inspect PDFs and PowerPoint files. Don't expect to see mobile enterprise apps on this platform anytime soon, if ever, though.

Other quick specs: quad-band GSM with EDGE and GPRS, plus HSDPA up to 3.6Mbps (not 7.2Mbps, though). Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), GPS, 2GB of internal memory, microSD card slot, 5-megapixel camera with LED flash, 1,100mAh li-ion battery with 492m/300m talk (2G/3G) and 422h/406h standby.



The Jet's Dolfin browser is WebKit-based, with built-in Flash support.

A week or so ago, Phil Wood, marketing director of UK start-up Interead, handed us a shiny new ('vivid violet' coloured) e-book reader called the COOL-ER. It launches officially today, at £189 (inc. VAT), in eight colours, along with a companion store selling e-books in a variety of formats.



COOL-ER is the brainchild of entrepreneur Neil Jones, and has been developed in double-quick time — six months from concept to production. The basic specs are these: a 6in., 170dpi, 8-greyscale e-ink screen; a sub-A5 footprint (189mm by 117.7mm) and 178g weight; a 400MHz Samsung S3C2440 processor with 128MB of RAM and 1GB of solid-state storage (with an SD card slot for expansion); 1,000mAh Li-ion battery that's good for a claimed 8,000 pages; and a Linux OS running the show. It supports a good range of file formats (PDF, EPUB, FB2, RTF, TXT, HTML, PRC, JPG, MP3) and connects straightforwardly to Windows PCs and Macs via USB. Wi-Fi is set to follow in due course, according to Wood.

The device looks a bit like an oversized iPod, and works pretty well once you're into reading a book, although it's not quick to start up or perform menu actions, and the volume isn't great when you're listening to MP3s on the train. But then, it's not supposed to replace your iPod, and it got me reading Pride and Prejudice (which is among a number of preinstalled classics) without the technology getting between me and the content — which has to be a sign of success.

The market is pretty well-stocked with e-book readers, including the Sony Reader, Pixelar e-Reader, Bookeen CyBook and iRex iLiad (not to mention the Kindle in the US), but the price is competitive and the e-book experience on today's smartphones isn't for everyone, so it has a sporting chance. It'll be interesting to see how the COOL-ER fares.

Firefox 3.5, which reached the Beta 4 milestone at the end of April, is now full steam ahead for Release Candidate (RC) status. According to the mozilla.dev.planning Google Group, the code will be frozen next Wednesday (May 20), with the RC release slated for sometime in the first week of June.

The next version of Firefox (previously known as version 3.1, but upgraded to 3.5 due to the amount of new functionality) will include a private browsing mode, the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine and location-aware browsing support.

According to Net Applications, Firefox currently has 22.5 percent of the total browser market, behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer (66.1%) and ahead of Apple's Safari (8.21%).

In troubled economic times the attractions of free software become increasingly obvious, and even for die-hard users of Microsoft Office, the prospect of upgrading to Office 2010 in Q1 next year may prove too much to contemplate. After all, Office 2007 essentially rearranged the deckchairs with the ribbon interface didn't it?

There have always been alternative, free, office suites — OpenOffice.org (OOo) chief among them. OOo may not have all the features of Microsoft Office, but it's plenty functional enough for the majority of mainstream users, many of whom will have been exposed to it in the last 18 months via software bundles on netbooks.

As operating costs in large organisations — particularly in the public sector — are squeezed ever tighter, we may see more migration stories. Closer to home (for us in media-land), The Guardian recently abandoned the Mac version of MS Office in favour of OpenOffice — no small beer at 1,000+ seats.

So it'll be interesting to see how Oracle digests the OpenOffice portion of its recent Sun-sized meal. The database giant certainly has plenty of new fish to fry, but a new stick with which to poke Microsoft must surely be tempting. Perhaps an online version of the suite, to counter Microsoft's moves in this direction, for example? The next year or so should prove interesting.