The work on the second version began as soon as the first one was released. The main feature of the second version is the SMB client which functions on the phone. That is SMB server implemented in the first version allowed external access to the phone disks, whereas, in the second version, the main goal was the access to computer's disks off the phone. Therefore the interface of the application has changed. SymSMB 2.0 is mainly a browser that allows full file access not only to the internal phone drives, but also the shared network computer locations.
The main view from SymSMB v1.10 exists in v2.0, however it is now under "Options/Settings" and has an additional folder "Network drives",which allows to map the shared network locations
The main development effort is completed now. Everything works as planned. If you have access to a computer that is on a network then you can access its shared locations. At this time, the effort is concentrated on testing and improving some aspects of the user interface.
During development we had a few interesting challenges which were all successfully solved:
1) Specifications of SMB client allowed us to implement a flexible power-saving (key for mobile devices) policy when accessing the computer. This is because the transport channel is only opened when there are active requests from the client. As soon as there's no activity (inactivity timer), the channel is closed thus preventing waste of power for an inactive connection. In summary, when the client is active, the transport channel is automatically opened and then automatically closed when activity ceases. On the other hand, for SMB server (access phone drives from a computer) activity, the connection has to be opened manually.
2) In the new version, the transport has been completely re-engineered. We believe SymSMB v2.0 operates practically at the physical capacity limit of wireless channels.
Aside from the novelties in the new version, significant attention has been given to removal of defects found after release of SymSMB v1.10. We are thankful to all the users that reported the errors. It helped determine the reasonable priorities and the paths toward their correction.
Defects found in v1.10 can be grouped in the following manner:
1) Speed - there were many concerns about the low speed. This was partially our fault, but as mentioned above this is now fixed. In addition, we had to research the speed of Nokia phones' WiFi components. The results were quite interesting.
2) Notorious error -34. The problem was that this error came up only during very specific conditions. We were able to reproduce with great difficulty on just one of the test phones. At this time, after the upgrade of the transport system we believe that this error has been fixed.
3) Microsoft Office files - when working with Microsoft (Office Word, Excel, etc.) files located on the phone (this group also includes renaming or changing attributes of the files) the expected changes were not saved. This was fixed.
4) Multi platform support - while SymSMB v1.10 only supported WindowsXP, v2.0 now works with Linux, Mac, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows Vista as requested:
We are confident that v2.0 users will not see these (and hopefully any other) errors.
The work is mostly on schedule and we hope that SymSMB v2.0 will find its customers in time!