Mobile World Congress 2008

I'd like to welcome all our readers to my report on Mobile World Congress 2008. MWC is the world's largest exhibition for the mobile industry. Up until this year, the event was known as the 3GSM World Congress; this is why it is still often referred to as 3GSM.

One of the first things I did was to meet with the folks at Spb Software House. They demoed the latest 2.0 version of Spb Mobile Shell, an alternate and customizable user interface for Windows Mobile touch screen devices. I plan to post a review of it and some similar programs on the blogs sometime in the future.

I also had the pleasure of meeting with some of the top folks from i-mate, a worldwide vendor of Windows Mobile devices. Originally, HTC manufactured all of i-mate's devices, but that relationship ended a year ago. In spite of rumors being circulated online, i-mate's representative confirmed that they would not be switching back to HTC as their device manufacturer. I also asked them about their decision to use the Intel PXA 270 processor in some models of their Ultimate line, instead of the newer Marvell PXA310/320 CPUs. They said they were investigating using the Marvell processors in future devices.

Microsoft announcements

I met with Microsoft's John Starkweather and asked him about the rumors of talks with Microsoft and Nokia. I'd love to see a high-end Nokia phone similar to the N95, N82, or the just-announced N96 but powered by Windows Mobile. Unfortunately, it looks like it's unlikely that Nokia will offer a Windows Mobile phone any time in the near future. However, Sony Ericsson did announce the XPERIA X1, a multimedia-friendly WVGA touch screen device powered by Windows Mobile.

I also attended Microsoft's press conference, which took place on Monday afternoon. The most important news here—in addition to the Sony Ericsson XPERIA announcement—was Microsoft's statement that it was going to invest far more resources toward enhancing the gaming and entertainment capabilities of Windows Mobile—a long-awaited move.

They were also showing MSN Direct in action at the press conference. MSN Direct is a digital service that allows portable devices to receive information from MSN services. After the conference, I met with the MSN Direct folks to learn more about it. It's similar to a RSS client that uses some kind of a bandwidth-friendly push protocol to receive real-time updates. Currently, MSN Direct client software is only available for the Windows Mobile 6 Standard (non-touch screen) smartphone (phone.msndirect.com/phone/index.html). However, they promised a touch screen version very soon; I'll also announce this when it becomes available.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1

A big crowd was gathered around the Sony Ericsson booth to look at demos of the new XPERIA X1, a Windows Mobile 6.1 touch screen device with a custom "Panels" user interface. I won't go into detail here because the XPERIA is covered in a separate article on page 10.

Toshiba Portege G910/920

I also had a chance to play with the new Toshiba Portege G910/920, a Windows Mobile 6 Professional device. The most interesting thing about this series is the 3-inch wide WVGA (800 x 480 pixels) touch screen display. (The XPERIA X1 also has a WVGA touch screen.). Also of note is the fact that the Portege is designed to be used as a clamshell device only—you cannot rotate the screen to Portrait mode for one-handed PDA use. The keys on the QWERTY thumb keyboard are pretty easy to use, but the screen was fairly small compared to the physical size of the lid. This seems to be a problem with other new clamshell-only Windows Mobile devices, such as the Asus M930(W) (a.k.a. P930).