Windows Phone Thoughts: Sproqit: Remote Control on Steroids

If you've ever tried Terminal Services Client on the Pocket PC, you know how useful it can be, but one of its big problems is the fact that accessing the desktop through a tiny PDA screen is cumbersome. There's now a company who aims to change that.

"Sproqit's architecture, called Spider Silk, cleverly separates application logic from display code. That's not new - Citrix's WinFrame software uses a similar approach - but it's arguably the first to do so in a personal desktop context. Essentially, applications continue to run on the desktop, via Sproqit Desktop Agent, and all that's transmitted across the Internet to the PDA telling it what to display. The handheld runs Sproqit Companion, a 200KB app that presents the data to the user using the hardware's native UI - so it looks like an embedded app. And by only transmitting display-related data, the systems bandwidth needs can be satisfied by slow networks like GSM."

They're aiming this solution to solve a variety of problems. According to this other article, the first release will be this summer and will support Pocket PCs, Smartphones, and Palms, and will compete against a number of other wireless solutions, including but not limited to the RIM platform. I'm not sure how well it'll work just yet, but it certainly sounds promising.