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Remote control of a PC from a phone?

It has to be the silliest sounding idea. Using a Smartphone would be daft enough - but how on earth do you propose to view the screen of a full size PC on an ordinary mobile? PocketWatch has announced a technology which actually does it. No need to buy a PDA!

Well, nearly, it does it. Obviously, you can't view 1024 by 768 pixels on something that has four lines of simple text and only rudimentary graphics.

"What we do," said founder Alex Heneveld, "is transfer the data, and display it appropriately."

So you can really run Word, Excel, Act! contact manager, and any other program which PocketWatch has adapted - including several that use the MAPI mail programming interface - plus Adobe PDF viewing. And they run on your own PC at home or at work - and you can look at the data on your phone.

It helps to have a large colour display; but they can actually manage it on a small GPRS phone with two or three lines of text. It's not entirely obvious how useful that would be for editing big Word documents - "You wouldn't want to read 'War and Peace' on it!" agreed Heneveld.

A Word document comes to your phone as hotlinks; each paragraph looking like a single word or two, underlined exactly as in a Web browser. Click on that link, and you will see the paragraph.

How? "PocketHub works by transforming your computer into a personal information hub which can be accessed and controlled remotely by any internet enabled mobile device such as a mobile phone, PDA or another computer."

So you have to buy software - fifty pounds - and you have to be able to set it up on your PC. You may not be allowed to try this at the office. You don't even need broadband; a dialup modem will work.

"You're connecting directly to your PC; we turn it into a mini Internet service provider, in effect. It will work behind network address translation and behind a firewall, if you know how to go out through a dynamic DNS provider - I use hammernode myself, but any of them are OK. And we provide a service like this ourselves."

The full list of supported phones, and applications, and what sort of PC you need to run it is available here.

Briefly, it is about 50 of the most popular devices. It's optimised for

Motorola T720i, 66i

Nokia 3410, 6100, 6610, 7210, 7250, 3510i, 6310i, 8310

Panasonic GD87

Samsung sghA300, sghA800, sghV200

Sharp GX10

Siemens A50, A55

Sony Ericsson T100, T300, T68m

If you have a permanent Internet connection for your computer, it will also work over Pocket PC, Palm, SPV Smartphone, Treo smartphone and Sharp GX10 PDAs. Have a look http://www.pocketwatchsystems.com/try/demo.html# at the demo!

Cost to run is nil, apart from the cost of data calls.

We didn't get to test it before this deadline, but there was a very impressive demo, where we accessed Alex's own machine at his head office in Edinburgh. Really, it was possible to edit a Word document on his phone, and check a contact phone number.

What you can't do, which I really would like to do (see separate story on Psion Software's Transcend package) is cut and paste from the contact manager, into the phone. And there are other items on the wish list! - but I'm sold ...