Mobius 2008 – Winter Session Wrap-Up

The winter 2008 edition of Mobius has come to an end and once again it proved to be a packed schedule over the course of a couple days. There was a lot of material talked about and the majority of it was NDA. So unfortunately, there isn’t too much that I can share with everyone. There was endless discussion and at times the talk got very heated. In the end, everyone means well and is trying to help drive Microsoft, T-Mobile, HTC, and others towards a better future.

We were lucky enough to get some pretty awesome gifts from HTC (s740 Smartphone), Microsoft (Flip MinoHD , Arc Mouse, Life Cam and of course, the travel and accommodation), and even fellow Mobian Shane from PPCSG who brought along some Singapore spices for us to try. I am already working on reviews of these products – including unboxing videos. HTC also put up some prizes for the evening events. Unfortunately, it would appear that I’m not the cook I thought I was and I’ve let the rest of Canada down with my poor skating ability.

We got an in-depth preview of Windows 7 from Mark Croft and Brian Lee. They talked to us about how Microsoft has improved Win7 to address a number of the concerns that they heard from customers regarding Vista. We didn’t see anything new here, and if you have the early beta installed, then you’ve seen more of it than I have. Some of the interesting points that I took away from this was the improved memory management, especially when it comes to running multiple applications. In the past, the framing for each window would take up some memory. In Win7, this has changed so that the common elements are stored in shared memory thus reducing the memory used when more applications are run. It seems so simple; I don’t know why it wasn’t done before!

The changes and additions made to home networking are really slick. The Homegroup as it’s being called provides an easy way to access documents from any machine in your house. It even allows you to start playing music or videos on a different machine in the environment. There’s also some really nice improvements to how devices interact with Windows 7. It has a lot of potential, but I’m not sure that the device manufacturers are really going to put the effort into doing it right. Time will tell.

Some of the other sessions on Day 1 revolved around the future direction of Windows Mobile. These talks were really insightful and I feel that as a community we let Microsoft know about the concerns we have regarding where the product is today and what it needs to do going forward.

After the first day, we all head out for a really nice dinner which was cooked by us in an Iron Chef style. I think we were all surprised at how well the meals turned out. Who would have thought that a bunch of geeks could cook as well as we did!

Day 2 brought on new discussions around new topics. Eric Lin from HTC lead the group in a discussion on what device manufacturers need to do in order to differentiate themselves from each other. There are a number of top-notch manufacturers and they all offer similar devices, form factors, and of course, mobile operating systems. I’m not sure if we actually helped Eric with this or if we just added more confusion to the issue.

Beth Goza, past Mobius co-ordinator, talked to the group about the developer channel with T-Mobile. They’ve implemented a fully automated application store that allows developers to build, upload, and target their apps to customers without having to wait for a human to review it. The system includes a pretty impressive ROI calculator that determines the approximant return you can expect based on the platforms and devices that you target.

Michael Gartenberg then took the stage and talked to us about analyzing the mobility market and what people find acceptable to carry and why. Michael is always a great speaker and he has a great understanding of the customer and their needs and desires. If you ever have a chance to listen to Michael, I highly recommend you do. You won’t be disappointed.

Day 2 came to an end with a talk around Windows Live / Live Mesh and the services it offers. I have a much better understanding of Azure and the recent announcement from Microsoft regarding its use. It will be very interesting to see products come to market over the coming months and years once Azure is fully available to the development community.

With the formal talks done for the day, the Mobius gang headed out for some fun and relaxing roller-skating / device hockey, followed by a really nice dinner at a local restaurant. It was a great way to close off a amazing couple days. It’s always fun to get together with other geeks who share the same interests and passions around mobility as you.

The following is a listing of all the attendees and the site they represent (thanks to Matt Miller for putting this together):

• Joel Evans, Geek.com
• Rafe Blandford, All About Symbian
• Paul O’Brien, MoDaCo.com
• Arne Hess, The Unwired
• Ryan Block, Gdgt
• Judie Lipsett, Gear Diary
• Rich Brome, PhoneScoop
• Jason Dunn, Thoughts Media
• Michael Oryl, Mobile Burn
• Lisa Gade, MobileTechReview
• Ed Hardy, Brighthand
• Sascha Segan, Gear Log
• Michael Gartenberg, Mobile Devices Today
• G-A Gay, Akihabara News
• Dieter Bohn, WM Experts
• Chris Ziegler, Engadget
• Vincent Nguyen, SlashGear
• Mike Temporale, MobileJaw
• Clinton Fitch, ClintonFitch.com
• Pressian Karakostov, PhoneArena
• Leigh Geary, Cool Smartphone
• Shane Chiang, PPCSG.com
• Jerome Tranie, Sojeng
• Paul Matt, ThreeGMobile.net
• Kzou, HTC Fan
• Matt Miller, ZDNet Cellphones and Smartphones

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