iPhoneCTO

Does Cisco’s WebEx for iPhone Really Work?

by Andrew Lunde on 12/03/09 at 10:42 pm

Andrew Lunde is an iPhone and Internet applications developer and the President of Lunde Cognitive Effects Inc. He is also a Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

These days, companies are doing everything they can to reduce costs without sacrificing productivity.   We are continually asked to do more with less with every aspect of our jobs.  Gone are the days of jetting off to a client meeting in San Jose or taking off for a two day continuing education class.  With smaller travel budgets and the high cost of fuel, the adoption of online conferencing solutions such as WebEx have become as commonplace in the office as fax machines and copiers.

Let’s say you’ve left the office for lunch. You stop by the bank, post office, snag a protein smoothie and then it’s time to head back for that 1PM WebEx.  Of course, you didn’t plan on a gas main break and the ensuing gridlock.   No problem.  Pull out your trusty iPhone and fire up the iPhone WebEx application.

Once you have the app installed you’re pretty much good to go, if you’re an invited participant.  You don’t need a WebEx account to join somebody else’s WebEx conference.  In most cases they will have sent you an email that has a special WebEx iPhone link in it.

Join a WebEx session

- Open the mail app and find the WebEx meeting invitation.  About half way down the page is a link for joining the meeting from your iPhone.  This will launch the WebEx application and then immediately put you back in the phone app where it will dial the WebEx conference number and then enter the conference code and participant code.
- The voice prompt will say “You will now be placed into the conference.”  At this point your iPhone is dialed into the teleconference portion of the WebEx session.  Don’t end the call. Press the home button to return to the main screen.
- Click on the WebEx application icon.  The app will launch and you will be immediately taken into the session.

The iPhone WebEx app is a limited version of the standard application.  On the web, the participant gets a window that displays what the host is showing on their screen and a list of participants that shows who is attending and what sort of connection they have.  Since the iPhone is more limited in terms of screen space, the app allows you to flip between viewing what is being shared and the list of participants.  There are two icons at the bottom center of the screen.  The one on the left is a picture of a movie screen (what’s being shared) and the one one the right is two people (list of participants).  The app doesn’t allow the iPhone user to manipulate anything that is being shared and it doesn’t allow the iPhone to share it’s own screen.  It’s strictly a view only capability.  However, the pinch and expand gestures are enabled to allow you to zoom in on any details or out to see the whole screen.  The app also works in landscape mode where it limits some of the controls but allows you to see the screen in more detail.  In landscape mode, you can’t get to the participants list, however, you can still mute and unmute your microphone.  I did also find that I kept triggering the proximity sensor near the top speaker.  Keep in mind that when you’re in a call, the phone is active and that means that it will blank the screen if you cover the proximity sensor with your thumb.  The display seemed to keep track of the presenter’s screen pretty well when the iPhone was connected to WiFi.

By clicking the participants (two people) icon you get to the list of attendees.  The host of the meeting is listed at the top and controls what is being seen and who (non iPhone users) gets control.  Each participant who has joined the meeting is listed with their name.  If they are connected with a web client, you’ll see a monitor icon, if connected with an iPhone, a phone icon.  There is a mic icon to the right that shows each user’s mic mute state.  If you click on another participant’s “>” icon you’ll be taken to a chat screen with that participant.  Use the “All Participants” participant to broadcast to everyone.  The host has ultimate control of what each participant can do.  They can mute everybody at once or allow non iPhone users to modify or annotate what’s being currently shared.  When everyone is muted, how does a participant signal the host that they have a question?  Well the web interface allows a participant to “raise a hand” to signal the host that they have a question.  Currently there is no such functionality in the iPhone app.

Caveats

- I accidently left the app and when I re-launched it, it wouldn’t reconnect to the existing session.
- When I tried to go back to the email link and re-launch the app from it, it put the existing call on hold and tried to dial in again.  I hung up and the app launched and connected to the session, but there was now no voice conference link.  I had to leave the meeting and then start over again from the email link.
- When using the iPhone to connect to a WebEx meeting, your iPhone’s name will be displayed.  Be sure that you have named your phone something other than “ThunderButt”.  If you don’t want your iPhone’s name to be used, fill out the profile and change your iPhone’s name to something else.  That is what will be used to identify you in the meeting.
- There is currently no way to schedule a WebEx meeting from the iPhone.
- There is no video sharing on the iPhone app.  You won’t be able to see what the host is showing.
- The host of the meeting must enable the iPhone feature before the meeting is started in order for the iPhone WebEx app to be able to join the meeting.
- Battery life.  I started a meeting with 1/2 battery and it was giving me low battery warnings within 30 minutes.  Keep your charger close at hand for longer meetings.
- If you fill out the profile with your WebEx account, I would expect it to show you your schedule of upcoming meetings.  It doesn’t seem to do that.  If there is a trick to making this work, I haven’t found it yet.
- Although the app tells you that you should call the meeting number, it actually does it itself.  When trying to connect to a meeting, the iPhone would often lose 3G and Edge connectivity. I may have only had one time when I was showing 3G and got the call connected and then successfully got the app connected to the meeting.
- Use a headphone with mic or a bluetooth headset.  The iPhone’s speaker mode is to quiet to be heard over any road noise you might be contending with.

Performance

I was about to give this app 4 of 5 stars as it seemed to be a reasonable compromise given that you could watch a meeting and listen concurrently as well as message other participants.  My main complaint is there is no way to alert the host that you had a question when all the participants were muted.  I tested the iPhone app over WiFi with the phone dialed into the meeting.  The voice quality had been normal as you would expect and the response of the shared presentation seemed quite responsive. However, the whole point of using WebEx on the iPhone is for situations where you don’t have access to a laptop or WiFi.  If you are lucky, you’ll have a strong 3G signal, otherwise, you’ll have to deal with Edge.  At first, I tried turning off the WiFi to see how that worked.  The launching of the meeting from the email link seemed to work fine.  However under 3G, when the phone app passed control back to the WebEx app the phone call dropped each time.  I turned 3G on and off, GPS off, Bluetooth off, but nothing seemed to work.  I could either get the phone to connect to the voice conference part of the meeting or the app to show the presentation, but not both.  A little checking on the WebEx support page confirmed this.  The best result I had on 3G was when I was called back from the WebEx service during a run of their online demo.

‘The application will work on a 2G iPhone only in one of the following ways: audio-only (teleconference); data only (view content but no audio on the iPhone); audio and data where the call-back is received on a different phone; audio and data where the call-back occurs over the cellular network while the data content is viewed over WiFi.

This leads me to believe that it should work properly when the phone has a 3G connection, but this wasn’t my experience.  Maybe I had a poor signal, but I could not get both the phone connection and the presentation sharing to work at the same time without using WiFi.  This to me is a major downside.  If I have access to WiFi and my laptop, I’m going to use that to participate in a WebEx meeting and not the iPhone.

With a WiFi connection, I noticed screen updates delayed an average of 5 seconds.  With 3G it was 15-30 seconds and with Edge it was often over a minute.  This also is nearly a deal killer.  While the shared whiteboard wasn’t bad on an Edge connection, most people are going to be going through PowerPoint slides or navigating a website and a 30 second delay is just not tolerable.

The Verdict

I was inclined to give this app 4 four stars until the WiFi/3G issue arose at which point I knocked it down to 2 stars.  I’ll return 1 star for a well thought out design and execution for what Cisco is accomplishing.  Overall, I’m impressed with the app running under WiFi.  Under 3G, I think it has a lot of promise if they can get the data service drop issue worked out. Final verdict, 3 stars.

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