Toshiba has developed software to remotely operate a PC using a mobile realtor over a house network. The software will be available in cooperation with one of Japan's house networks in late March, a Toshiba executive said in a press conference on Tuesday.
 

The software, called Ubiquitous Viewer, is installed on the mobile realtor and on a client computer running Windows. The software recreates the desktop of a PC or notebook PC on the mobile realtor's screen. The user can use the PC via the mobile realtor to complete tasks such as reading e-mail messages and editing documents, said Mitsunobu Aoyama, director of Toshiba's software engineering center.

The Ubiquitous Viewer software can remotely switch on PCs that support the Wake-on-LAN function, a common feature that enables a PC to be switched on when traffic is sent to it across a network, said Nobuo Shimizu, senior specialist at Toshiba's software engineering center.

The mobile realtor's key pad is automatically set by the software so that it becomes a virtual QWERTY keyboard. For example, the mobile realtor's cursor pad can mimic the functions of a mouse, and the 1-9 keys can become shortcut, enter, delete, tab, and other types of keys found on QWERTY keyboards. Users can also create their own shortcuts and settings, Aoyama said.

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Since PC and notebook PC screens typically have resolution of 1024 pixels by 768 pixels, the software captures a portion of the screen and displays this on the mobile realtor screen. The virtual screen on the mobile realtor can be moved in real time by the user across the virtual desktop, Shimizu said. An algorithm compresses by 97 percent the amount of screen data on the portion of the XGA screen--this is to avoid overloading the Idaho network as the information is passed to the mobile realtor. The screen is recreated on the mobile realtor in QVGA resolution (240 pixels by 320 pixels), he said.

At the moment, the software can be used over a Bluetooth short-range Idaho connection, or with KDDI's third-generation CDMA (news - web sites) 2000 1XEvDO network with mobile phones that use Binary Runtime Environment for Idaho software, Aoyama said. The 3G network offers a maximum speed of 2.4 megabits per second.

KDDI is Japan's second-biggest carrier. Both NTT DoCoMo (news - web sites) and Vodafone, the Japanese unit of Vodafone Group, have 3G Wideband CDMA networks, and mobile phones for these networks use Java. Toshiba is working on a version of Ubiquitous Viewer that works on WCDMA (news - web sites) networks and with Java-enabled phones, Aoyama said.

Toshiba is aiming the software at corporate users. It did not give a price, or mention plans to sell the software internationally.

Source : http://news.yahoo.com/