Citrix client on the HTC Touch Diamond

In the past I have mentioned using the Citrix client on Windows Mobile devices. I’ve had a great deal of success using it on the HTC Advantage, both the X7500 and X7510.

The Client will install and run on most Windows Mobile devices (devices running Windows CE Smartphone Edition or Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition are not supported) but it’s not terribly useful on 320×240 screen devices as there really isn’t enough screen real estate. So this got me to thinking – how well will Citrix run on the HTC Touch Diamond and is the screen big enough to be useful?

The client can be downloaded from the Citrix Website and is easily installed with activesync from your desktop PC.

I’ve been experimenting with the Citrix client today and managed to get connected to my Citrix farm and run several applications quite easily. The VGA display on the Diamond is just about large enough to use a few basic applications (Word, Excel some bespoke apps.) and an HSDPA connection is fast enough to be useful.

A few things that I had to do before getting it to work properly was to use Internet Explorer to connect to the application server rather than Opera. Opera wont launch the Citrix Client and attempts to use Java instead, whereas Internet Explorer launches properly. You can find Internet Explorer in the Windows folder on the Diamond and you can run it from File Explorer.

Secondly I had to install the Equifax Secure eBusiness root certificate as these are not trusted by default on WM devices.

So those few things out of the way it was easy to connect to my application server and fire up the apps I needed. I really wish that Citrix would develop the client a bit more though. I’d like to see options to run full screen and easily minimise and zoom etc. I think on of the biggest things that it’s missing is the ability to rotate the screen on the client. Perhaps it’ll get more attention as more people use it?!

Posted by: Matt

[Post tag(s): smartphone blog, Pocket PC blog, HTC Touch Diamond, Citrix, Tracy & Matt]