Posted by Arne Hess - at Monday, 03.12.07 - 12:49:11 CET under 06 - Thoughts - Viewed 6898x
Tagged under: [Möbius_2007] [Thought]
This
year's
annual Möbius event is over now and I came back late yesterday evening
from Amsterdam (where I staid an extra night on my own bill). So how was Möbius
2007? It was great, as every year. Not only because of the presentations we got
from Microsoft, HTC, Qualcomm and Forester Research but also because of the
discussion we had during these presentations and between the sessions. Möbius
isn't a one-way conference where you listen the presenter but the presenter asks
for feedback and is giving a topic which the attendees are discussing with each
other as well as with the presenter.
This year's list of attendees included a list of online writers, journalists
and bloggers from all over
the world including:
As always, Day 0 started with an evening come-together where John
Starkweather of Microsoft and host of Möbius, again explained what Möbius is
about:
Möbius is about a never ending conversation. A group devoted to following and
reporting on topics and news related to mobile devices (not Windows Mobile
only!) and consumer electronics.
After we had the chance to meet the other conference participants including
representatives of Microsoft, HTC, Qualcomm and AstraWare and the evening ended
- where else in the Hotel bar.
Day 1 was fully packed with presentations and discussion by:
Microsoft, where
Jason Landridge from Microsoft UK showed a couple of interesting Windows Mobile
software demos as well as passed some of the recently released Windows Mobile
devices along. Nothing really new yet and nothing we hadn't seen already.
After, Derek Snyder gave us a NDA preview of what you can call (for now)
"Windows Mobile Next" (see
here for more information). Basically it was an overview what we can expect
from next's Windows Mobile version and as I wrote before, it's nothing
groundbreaking but the enhancements makes it worth anyway.
Paul Jackson from
Forrester
Research was talking about current and upcoming mobile trends as well as he
gave an overview of some interesting figures. But I have to admit that I'm
always skeptical about analyst's predictions. Nevertheless, he gave some
interesting opinions which are worth to keep in mind for upcoming developments.
Steve Horton from
Qualcomm gave us some interesting insights about Qualcomm, what Qualcomm's
business is and how their chips works with operating systems (like Windows
Mobile) and how to cooperate with ODMs (like HTC).
Even if quite technical, this presentation was definitely interesting to get a
better understanding about the chips, used in most Windows Mobile UMTS
smartphones.
The last presenter was John Wang, Chief Marketing Officer at
HTC and the brain behind HTC's
TouchFLO technology (which was developed in HTC's Magic Labs - a second R&D arm
within HTC which less focuses on technologies like antenna designs but on
usability). I met John before already and the way he explained TouchFLO and why
TouchFLO is working as it does today is quite interesting. Basically it's
reduced to the idea of using a GUI without learning how to use it but using it
in a native way a user expects to use it.
Furthermore, and this was another NDA part of the day, was the showing of some
HTC internal only prototypes which explained how TouchFLO was developed as well
as how a device design in general is done (in general quite similar to car
designs which also starts with renderings, followed by 1:1 models, before the
first car hits the street).
The day ended with an
Amsterdam Chanel
Cruise and a dinner, hosted by HTC, where we had the chance to follow-up
what we've heard before.
Day 2 started with an update about the "Möbius Project" which started
during last year's Möbius events in Thailand and Boston and I will follow-up
with this later.
The first presenter was Rafe Blandford (Möbius participant and owner of
All About Symbian)
who gave us an quite impressive update about the latest Symbian, UIQ and S60
developments in terms of platforms, GUIs, handsets and services. I always like
to listen Rafe's experiences since it definitely better helps to understand what
mobile devices in general an Symbian/UIQ/S60 in particular offers today and
where it does better or worse. At the end it's always a question of taste if you
use the one or the other platform but it cannot be something religious at all.
Jeff McKean from Microsoft's
Windows Live team was the right one to bridge Rafe's previous presentation
and the general Windows Mobile focus since he showed a couple of Windows Live
services on different mobile devices, including Windows Mobile, Nokia S60 and a
standard non-smartphone Samsung mobile phone. Windows Live, including Windows
Live Messenger, is available for a broad range of devices and it was interesting
to hear Microsoft's opinion about platform compatibility and interoperability.
Last but not least we finished the day with a break-out session where four
groups had to discuss what we would do if we would be the management of S60,
Android, Windows Mobile and Apple in terms of improving the brand, customer
perceptions and the OS in general. Was quite an interesting and vital discussion
with Jenneth, Nghia, Ryan, Andrew and Jason (we was the Windows Mobile
management team).
Day 2 closed with a dinner invitation by Qualcomm where we had another chance
to review the past two days with all the Möbius attendees and we had some
interesting ongoing discussions on our part of the table where I sat next to
Ryan Block, Derek Snyder, Eric Lin, John Starkweather and Steve Horton.
And now the disclosure: Airfare, hotel and conference was covered by
Microsoft (including free WiFi access during the sessions). Day 1 dinner was
sponsored by HTC and day 2 dinner was sponsored by Qualcomm.
While no carrier took the opportunity to present, Vodafone NL was kind enough to
gave each attendee a free data-only enabled USIM card to be used with Vodafone
NL's (excellent) HSDPA network. HTC thankfully gave each attendee an HTC Touch
Dual 10-keys version and Microsoft gave away a full version of Windows Vista,
Office 2007 Ultimate, Mass Effect for Xbox 360. Skooba provided a Shuttle bag,
SanDisk provided a 8 GB microSD memory card with miniSD and SD adapter, CoPilot
provided CoPilot Live 7, Qualcomm sponsored a 1 GB USB stick and a (paper)
notepad and AstraWare sponsored a VIP membership and Soduku Revolution voucher.
Thanks a lot to Microsoft for hosting another Möbius conference as well as
thanks to all the speakers and participating companies for taking the time to
present their latest views and developments as well as sponsoring this year's
Möbius event in Amsterdam.
Sure is, but as it's obvious that Arne already has more than enough of gadgets, I'm sure he already has sent the Touch Dual and the microSD card my way. Don't mention it Arne, I'm glad to store all the useless junk you receive
If you haven't already sent the micrSD card, I guess you can give it a quick try in the KS20 for me?
Posted by Arne Hess on 03.12.07 - 20:17:25
@Paul J.: Yes, we received quite a couple of freebies, no question.
@MTM: I would (send it over to you), if I know who you are but since you are an unregistered user of the Forum, I cannot since I don't know who you are! But you are right - now I have a serious microSD HC memory card I can and will use for upcoming compatibility tests! And, to make a long story short - you waited so long for the answer: The KS20 doesn't recognizes it, the Touch Dual recognizes and shows 8 GB out of the box without installing any further drivers or hacks. Coming next: Testing the Xda-developers driver...
Posted by _MTM_ on 03.12.07 - 21:22:17
Arne Hess wrote:
@Paul J.: Yes, we received quite a couple of freebies, no question.
@MTM: I would (send it over to you), if I know who you are but since you are an unregistered user of the Forum, I cannot since I don't know who you are! But you are right - now I have a serious microSD HC memory card I can and will use for upcoming compatibility tests! And, to make a long story short - you waited so long for the answer: The KS20 doesn't recognizes it, the Touch Dual recognizes and shows 8 GB out of the box without installing any further drivers or hacks. Coming next: Testing the Xda-developers driver...
Ahhh... That's just not fair! :p
That's what I thought. I don't know know if I have already posted the link, but here it is again:
Check first post on page 7 for someone who has a 4 GB microSDHC card working in his KS20 - and writing pretty accurate what he did
The hack made it and I now get 7765.34 MB displayed as available card memory. However, Total Commander wasn't able to replace one of the DLLs but only Resco Explorer worked.
Posted by MTM on 04.12.07 - 17:41:15
Arne Hess wrote:
The hack made it and I now get 7765.34 MB displayed as available card memory. However, Total Commander wasn't able to replace one of the DLLs but only Resco Explorer worked.
This
year's
