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On
Friday and Saturday (7-8th Sept) I attended the Mobius 2001
conference at Microsoft in Seattle. Together with about
50 other people we were treated to more details regarding
the latest version of the Pocket PC shell than you could
shake a stick at. If you are interested here is a somewhat
disparate collection of information relating to the conference
and Pocket PC 2002. What is Mobius 2001 you ask? Well Derek
Brown and Beth Goza (Marketing Manager) were the key people
involved in this initiative to bring Pocket PC webmasters
and personalities into the fold - sharing the technology
and reasoning behind the Pocket PC platform's functionality
and design. "We feel that is it important to inform
the early-adopters about this technology. Webmasters evangelizing
Pocket PC technology need to understand the decisions and
process we have been through to bring it to the table. This
is a separate focus from the enterprise outreach.",
said Derek Brown Microsoft Pocket PC's Lead Marketing Manager.
The conference was two days long - Friday
and Saturday and was fully sponsored by Microsoft. Although
they gave out some exciting goodies - not the least of which
was a 64MB iPAQ flash updated to the Pocket PC 2002 operating
system - the highlights of the conference were the speakers
and the Q&A sessions that arose afterwards, as well
as a very friendly and excited group of Pocket PC and PDA
techies. Obviously I was attending with my developers hat
on and was keen to ferret out the advantages this latest
shell would have for us developers - but I also discovered
a lot about what makes applications compelling on mobile
platforms from a passionate and experienced group of techies.
What is Pocket PC 2002?
Pocket PC 2002 is the latest Pocket
PC interface to run on the Windows CE 3.0 interface. It
was code named "Merlin" and it replaces Pocket
PC 2000 (code named "Rapier"). Although I'm sure
many of you are aware it bears reiterating that Pocket PC
2002 is not an operating system - it is the graphical interface
that runs on Windows CE - just as Pocket PC 2000 does. For
the more technically minded it is a shell. That said though
I believe there are some minor tweaks to the version of
Windows CE 3.0 that is flashed onto the devices supporting
Pocket PC 2002.
Mobius 2001
The
conference was kicked off by Derek Brown and Beth Goza explaining
the format of the two days and answering important questions
such as when we got to see the new interface on those shiny
new 64mb iPAQ's! After that we had a full day of guest speakers
dealing with implementation and design considerations relating
to PPC 2002 as well as numerous mobile platform topics.
A lot of content was covered so although I won't be able
to cover all the topics I would like to cover those that
really had an impact.
Juha Christensen, VP of Mobility
Marketing, Sales and Solutions
Juha delivered a keynote address discussing
Microsoft's efforts to deliver on its mobility portfolio
by providing the best software for enabling the mobile enterprise.
Of most interest to me was his impressions as to where the
industry was heading as a whole.
John Strand, CEO of Strand
Consult (Denmark)
John
gave a particluarly interesting speech on the revenue sharing
initiatives that the European wireless operators have embarked
upon. Essentially wireless providers in Europe share revenue
with those mobile sites that drive traffic (read air time).
They have done this by partly increasing their rates and
secondly providing some incentive for content providers
to expand their mobile offerings. He was a compelling and
exciting speaker and he fervently believes that the US market
will need to follow the same model to achieve sustainable
growth.
Derek Jacoby, Program Manager at
Microsoft Research
Derek gave an interesting demo of the
current state of MS speech recognition technologies. The
demo of Mipad
was very interesting - I must admit to being surprised that
the speech recognition technology architecture was broken
down into a client and server application. Now not for one
minute do I believe that you can run a speech recognition
app on a handheld - but I just hadn't considered the idea
that you could run a client that then compresses the voice
data (using a very lossy technology from about 350k down
to 3-6K), passes that off to a server which then does the
interpretation and returns the commands to the handheld.
Currently the compression is not supported, hence the demo
only really works over an 802.11 lan, however once the compression
is enabled it may mean that this technology is available
over GSM and GPRS cellular communications. Given the limitations
of PDA input speech technology this will be very important
- especially if we can solve the computational and bandwidth
issues. Very cool stuff!
So what is the impact on developers
Until the Pocket PC SDK is released
(late October) I can't tell you to much about what this
means for us developers (usual NDA stuff). But I can say
that the future for the Pocket PC keeps getting brighter
all the time. There are some features of Pocket PC 2002
that will be very attractive to developers - but
- Pocket PC 2002 apps will only run on ARM based CPU's.
Luckily most (but not all) of the apps designed for the
current version of the Pocket PC will continue to run on
2002. All in all Mobius 2001 was a great experience - I
met some great people - even if some of them were of the
Palm persuasion <g>!
Take
me to the Mobius 2001 conference pics
Take
me to the Pocket PC 2002 screen caps
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