SAP's Afaria controls multiple species of smartphone, tablet

 What happens if Auckland mayor Len Brown is browsing sensitive documents on his iPad on the train, but then jumps off at Britomart leaving his tablet behind?, asks SAP’s New Zealand country manager Graeme Riley.

Apple aficionados would suggest the super mayor use Mobile Mobile, a service that can be used to remotely wipe an iPad (or iPhone)

But Mr Brown also packs a BlackBerry (the new councils handset of choice. Like Parliamentary Services, which supplies BlackBerries to all MPs, it sees RIM’s buttoned-down handsets as having a security advantage.

Software company SAP – no stranger to Mr Brown – is pushing a new solution called Afaria for wrangling mobile phones in large corporations.

While all forms of remotely controlling cellphones are not new, from turning a camera off from afar to remotely changing a password, Afaria has mult-species support. It can be used to control Apple, Google Android and BlackBerry phones, among others. The product is just released; Mr Riley says so far there has been a lot of interest, but so far no local customers.

A better way to photograph a car crash
Say your car’s in a prang. In SAP’s vision of the near future, you could take a smartphone photo the scene of the accident, rather than drawing a bodgy map.

You’d send it to your insurance company, which would pick up on the photos GPS tags, so you wouldn’t need to record its location, either.

Another scenario: you see a pothole in your street. You take a smartphone photo, and send it to the council, which picks up geotags on your snap then dispatches a crew – then sends you a photo when it’s finished (okay, we might be far into fantasy land now).

In an age where simple txt-to-park systems often play up, it all seems a bit far-fetched, for now. But SAP has recently released the Sybase Unwired Platform (or SUP; SAP bought Sybase for $US6.5 billion last year), which it helps will make it happen. “Apple has forever changed the world with the iPhone and the iPad,” SAP country manager Graeme Riley told NBR.

“We have to accept that Apple’s interface is rather better than SAP’s.” The German company’s aim with SUP is to take iPhone style user-friendliness, but apply it to a development product that lets you develop apps that can be used on not just an iPhone, but also an Android or BlackBerry.