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You DO want Windows on your mobile!

On the face of it, it's your worst nightmare: you turn your phone on, and it comes up with the "Start" button and a Windows logo. Could it happen? It could! - and a company called Citrix thinks it will; and that there's money to be made by making it possible.

The first phone it's going to work on will be the Nokia 9200 - that dual-function phone and PDA. Ironically, this phone doesn't run Windows; it doesn't even run the "pocket Windows" that you get on PocketPC devices. It runs Psion's spin-off, Symbian, as its operating system.

The combination showed up at the Cannes 3GSM show this week, when Citrix Systems, Inc. announced that it has obtained validation from the Nokia OK programme for the Citrix Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) Client, for the Symbian platform.

The ICA technology allows wireless (cellphone) users to access Windows, UNIX and Java applications on Nokia's 9200 Series Communicator mobile devices.

What happens is not that Windows actually runs on your phone or PDA. Instead, you run the Windows program on your PC - on a server, called a Terminal Server. And your phone becomes the terminal.

The key point, says Citrix, is that you can have access data trapped in Windows systems, even if you have a very slow link. "Many of the attributes of the Nokia 9200 Communicator Series, aimed at mobile professionals, reflect the direction in which the wireless communications industry is heading," said the company. "These features include a high-resolution colour display, high-speed mobile e-mail, a new user interface and multimedia capabilities such as full-colour video clips."

The features offered by the Citrix ICA Client for the Nokia 9200 Communicator Series include international keyboard support, client drive mapping, and panning and scaling for navigating PC form factor applications on the device monitor.

In other words, they hope they've found a way of sensibly squeezing the 1024 by 768 pixels that you normally see on a PC screen, into the far smaller area of the Nokia 9200 display.

The idea may seem quirky, even potty; but if you look into the future, as Roger Baskerville does in the Citrix "embedded systems" division, you will see devices like this being split into two; with one part doing the wireless, and another part doing the display. A pocket display could be quite big in a year or two; someone who has a way of running Word or Excel on their hand-held device could find themselves involved in a big market.

"Companies today need to build a productive, mobile workforce by allowing employees to access information without being slowed down by traditional bandwidth limitations," said Roger Baskerville, director of Embedded Systems.

He believes he has a jump on the rest of the market, as people discover a need to run office applications when out in the field, without carrying a full PC around with them.

The Citrix ICA Client for the Symbian platform is currently available as a download from their web site.