In 2008 Nokia introduced the option with their E-Series Symbian phones E66 and E71 the ability to have 2 completely separate home screens with different shortcuts for Personal & Work and easy switching between them. The idea was that you should be able to carry one phone at all times but at work, your needs would be different from what you’d need in your off-work hours. I thought, at the time, that that was a pretty darn good idea and my friend Al, who had an E71 loved using it, but I never really saw it take off or any other company develop it. And then, LG & VMware made an announcement that changed all that.

The idea has actually been taken way further than I had ever imagined and it almost looks like a shot across the bow at BlackBerry and their stranglehold on Enterprise clients. Using Android at first, LG and VMware are going to make it so that an employee would merely have to take their phone into their company’s IT Dept and have them install this overlay onto their personal smartphone. Once this is done, it will be as if the employee is carrying two completely separate phones with them at all times.

The video below (via Engadget) really explains it very well; however I am still left with some questions it didn’t explain. What happens when someone calls the inactive profile? Does it go directly to voicemail? What about when the inactive profile receives an email? Is there a notification within the active profile? I am going to guess the answers to those questions are: Voicemail & No. From the video it looks as if the VPN access to the work phone is the same as a lot of us have used over the years to access our work computers from our home computers. If it isn’t active you aren’t using it and it isn’t running in the background. It does have the benefit, like the VPN access to our work computers, of being completely controlled by the company IT Dept. and completely separate from our personal computers even though they are running on the same physical device.

I am very interested to see how this develops. There is also talk by LG, if the market demands it, of expanding this platform to other devices; Engadget is guessing that refers to Windows Phone 7. This development makes perfect sense with mobile data connections getting faster, phone processors & operating systems becoming more powerful and we as a society becoming more mobile and relying on our phones while expecting them to do ever more for us.

I wonder how BlackBerry is going to deal with this, might be time to break out the really big guns and get President Obama into one of those BBM Commercials (Video in link). Also gotta think about what Cupertino is going to do about this, because as far as I know there ISN’T “an app for that”.

For more on this:

Check out the article on Engadget [LINK]

Check out the full Press Release [LINK]

VMware’s site [LINK]

LG Global’s site [LINK]