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Enterprise Apps Galore On Display At Nokia Application Summit

Live from Madrid, Spain, Over The Air got the latest scoop on some cool enterprise applications for the connected business user. Ranging from business card readers to invoice approval and device security applications, there's a wealth of enterprise tools for the Symbian S60 platform to make working on the go more productive.

Writing from the show floor here in sunny Madrid, there's no doubt that Symbian S60 is an able enterprise platform. We had an opportunity to see some demonstrations of select enterprise applications for Symbian S60 devices, the world's most-deployed smartphone operating system. Here's a roundup of what we saw.

Abbyy: If you're anything like me, you often travel to industry confabs and come away with scores of new business cards to add to your database. There's nothing quite as painful as typing them all into your contacts program. Even scanning them can be grating. This nifty little application we saw from Abbyy turns any camera-equipped S60 phone into an instant business card reader. Simply take a close-up picture of the business card, run the software, and Bam!, it automatically adds the contact to your phonebook and populates all the fields with the correct information. Tres useful.

BasWare: Say you're on the road and know you won't get to an Internet connection any time soon when an urgent message comes in about an invoice that needs to be approved. No worries, BasWare has you covered. Its BasWare Mobile for Enterprise Purchase to Pay application sits on top of your enterprise ERP or invoicing system. The client resides on your S60 device and allows you to approve, save, forward, and file invoices at will. Nothing like being able to pay bills when you're on the run!

DataViz: DataViz is a provider of Office compatibility products, Docs to Go, as well as its own push e-mail product, RoadSync. Both products have been available on the Palm platform for some time, allowing users of Treo smartphones to view and edit Microsoft Office documents. DataViz has now expanded its offering to include Series 60 devices. While editing Word or Excel files on mobile devices is often tedious, Docs to Go offers full formatting on mobile devices and lets you interact with your important business documents just as you would on a PC. Now you won't have any excuse to avoid making those edits.

Handmark: Handmark has been providing Palm with productivity tools from the start. The latest iteration of its Pocket Express software empowers smartphones with quick access to a host of useful information such as news headlines, weather, stocks, and travel updates. Its core product is also available on the Series 60 platform and incorporated into the S60 version of a "Today" screen. For enterprise users who need quick sound bites of news, this is a great tool to find them.

HP/Bitfone: HP recently acquired Bitfone, which is a provider of end-to-end device management solutions. Its product allows IT managers to more easily control mobile devices. The FusionDM software, for example, has a Web-based server console that enables full over-the-air updates or patches to S60 devices and lets IT managers maintain fleets of smartphones at a time.

Trend Micro: Trend Micro provides network antivirus and Internet content security software and services. The Mobile Security 3.0 product we saw demoed combines an antivirus and firewall on S60 smartphones to protect against viruses, worms, Trojans, and SMS spam. The firewall also guards devices with on-board Wi-Fi from hack attacks, denial-of-service attacks, and other intrusions.

While Symbian S60 devices are not as common in the United States as elsewhere in the world, the wealth of enterprise applications available for the platform should cause any IT department to consider it more seriously.

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