Kathea announces Polycom RealPresence Mobile 1.3

Runs on HTC and more Apple Devices, lets users control the camera on other end of a video meeting

Kathea, a distributor of visual communications solutions, has announced the availability of the latest version of Polycom RealPresence Mobile – 1.3.  This update expands availability to the HTC One S, HTC One X, and HTC Jetstream tablet, along with the new Apple iPad. RealPresence Mobile 1.3 also includes an innovative camera control feature to remotely control the camera on the other end of a video meeting allowing users to zoom in, pan, or tilt the camera to get a better look at the subject or the environment.  When combined with Polycom RealPresence Platform, customers can scale to support 10,000 devices.

Says Steven Robertson, UC Product Manager at Kathea: “This feature is especially important in many vertical market applications such as healthcare, for more in-depth patient consultations; educational settings, for panning the classroom or zooming in on a speaker or presentation; and manufacturing plants, to closely examine the products on the factory floor. The local market is ready for such functionality when considering the benefits that eLearning, remote examinations for medical practitioners and monitoring in a production environment can offer.”

Polycom RealPresence Mobile lets customers extend the use of video collaboration beyond the conference room to easily connect with other standards-based video environments virtually anywhere in the world, including immersive video theatres, conference rooms, desktop systems, laptops, and other mobile devices.

“With the explosive growth of mobile workforces and the increasing trend toward employees bringing their own devices into the workplace, Polycom and our partners are continually expanding the reach of secure video collaboration to support all devices, operating systems, protocols, and networks,” says Sudhakar Ramakrisha, President of Products and Services, Polycom. “No other company is delivering innovative video collaboration experiences on mobile devices like Polycom.”

Smartphone and tablet proliferation continues to grow rapidly. In just the last 12 months, smartphone penetration has gone up 34 percent and tablet adoption up 400 percent. Today, hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets are sold annually, 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies are testing or deploying iPads,2 and there are more than 1 billion mobile workers worldwide.3 With the proliferation of these devices and increasing demand to cost-effectively communicate face-to-face from anywhere, Polycom is uniquely addressing the challenge with a highly secure mobile video solution that runs across multiple tablets and smartphones.

Video Enabling Faster Decision Making and Application Flexibility across Vertical Industries

Enterprises as well as vertical market segments such as healthcare, education, government, manufacturing, and finance, are using Polycom RealPresence Mobile to connect through video for faster decision making at home, in remote locations, and on the go. For IT administrators and users, the enterprise-grade quality, security, scalability, and features of Polycom RealPresence Mobile can make all the difference – from a professor teaching students around the world, to medical practitioners who trust Polycom for the highest quality video for remote patient care, to enterprises mobilising their sales force.

The intuitive user interface of RealPresence Mobile also allows users to simultaneously view content, such as presentations, in high-quality during video sessions. Upgrades to the Polycom RealPresence Platform provide improved security for mobile devices without the complexity of firewall traversal or networking configurations.

RealPresence Mobile, powered by the Polycom RealPresence Platform, was developed with Polycom’s open standards-based approach to ensure it can seamlessly interoperate with the broadest range of related applications, protocols, call control systems, and end points. Similar to connecting a smartphone to the corporate email server, RealPresence Mobile can be registered to the RealPresence Platform, allowing customers to enjoy advanced features including provisioning, management, firewall traversal, content sharing, and connectivity to desktop and immersive video room systems, including multi-party calls.

Availability

The RealPresence Mobile 1.3 software application is now available as a free download from the Apple AppStore for the new iPad, iPad 2, and iPhone 4S; and from Google Play for the HTC One S, HTC One X, and HTC Jetstream; the Motorola XOOM and the DROID XYBOARD by Motorola; and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 and 10.1. All components of the Polycom RealPresence Platform are available through Polycom’s certified channel partners.