Jason Sjobeck
President, The Sjobeck Company; Treo Enthusiast

OpenDNS: Tell us about yourself. What do you do for a living?

JS: I’m the president of The Sjobeck Company. We’re internetworking consultants. We design, install, manage and troubleshoot our clients’ networks and devices nationwide.

OpenDNS: I know mobile devices are integral to your business. Which are your
favorites?

JS: The Treo 650. I have a few guys working for me using them as well as a few Blackberrys. I prefer the Treo over the Blackberry, since whatever it lacks in email, it makes up for in all of its other functionalities and openness. I want to get a new one that does EDGE or EVDO or UTMS (it is effort to keep track of all the carriers’ broadband acronyms) but I just haven’t come across one yet that fits. The perfect solution would be the Treo 650, but with WiFi & UMTS & be a hair smaller/thinner/lighter with another 24 hours battery life. Can you invent me one of those? You would be a kajillionaire if you could.

OpenDNS: I wish I could. So you love your Treo, but prior to OpenDNS, did
DNS service for your Treo cause any problems for you?

JS: Wasted time. Not to mention the annoyance of having to type URLs into
the tiny little address bar. If you made a mistake, it wouldn’t redirect you or give you a nice list of choices of places you probably meant to go. It was a problem of wasted time on typos, multiplied 30 fold over all of our employees and clients.

OpenDNS: Would you recommend OpenDNS to other businesses who rely on
smartphones?

JS: Definitely. The carriers’ name servers don’t do anything special — fast, useful, unique, safe, et cetera — while OpenDNS does all those things. I recommend OpenDNS for all users of all smartphones because I’ve noticed on our few dozen Treos so far fast, safe, reliable URL resolution as well as the time and money saving feature of URL redirection for mistyped URLs.

OpenDNS: Is it time to expect more from your phone?

JS: Absolutely. I know it sounds a little extreme to say, but every second counts. I’m driving, working, eating, have a client on the phone, have a vendor on call-waiting, have to email in an order for a part and I dont want to be buggering-around with my browser looking for sites. Drives me just a tiny bit (more) crazy. Any chance to make the day flow a little smoother is well worth it.

Note to OpenDNS customers: Use OpenDNS on your mobile device! We have some mobile instructions but are always looking for more. If you’ve successfully set up OpenDNS on your mobile, tell us how you did it. Post your instructions here, send us an email or share them in the OpenDNS Forums.

Phones, PDAs, and every other mobile device smaller than a laptop and bigger than an iPod Shuffle needs DNS for web browsing, among other things. With speedier networks, the mobile web is getting more and more useful…and speedy DNS makes the experience better. Frankly, I had forgotten this obvious use of OpenDNS, until we started seeing our users comment on websites devoted to mobile devices.

Thanks for the reminder!

Change your mobile to OpenDNS

Today, we added instructions about how to change DNS on your mobile device, with our first entries covering Windows Mobile and Palm OS 5 (Treo).

Help us provide more details

Mobile devices are even more numerous and diverse than routers, so I’d love your help in two areas.

First: let us know which other devices most need instructions for changing to OpenDNS. Please include carriers and countries, if informative.

Second: if you’d like to write instructions to share your personal knowledge, I’d welcome the assistance. Send instructions and/or screenshots to our contact email address or link to instructions in the comments here.

Note: I’m still working out how I might expense a Sony PSP so I can write up instructions about how to use OpenDNS on this (ahem) “productivity” device.