Windows Phone Thoughts: Mobius 2006 Thailand: Day One

When Derek mentioned Orb and Windows Media Center, my ears perked up. He demoed an app called Lobster, which allows you to connect to your Windows XP machine and access all your media from your machine. It's a competitor to Orb, so it's a server-type app that installs on your PC and monitors your media. Lobster then gives you a local Windows Mobile app to access your music and photos (that's it for now) with the speed of a local client. That put a smile on my face, since I recently wrote an article about Orb and my primary complaint was that it was very slow being strictly browser-based. Lobster looks cool – the demo didn't work however, so I was unable to get much of an impression of it. The basic idea looks great, especially if they can programmatically tap into the Media Center TV guide and allow remote browsing and tagging of TV shows to record.



Derek then showed a line-of-business application called Mobile Med Visualization where he showed a medical application that uses the Intel 2700G 3D accelerator on a Dell Axim X51v to do a real-time rendering of a 3D heart scan from a patient. He also showed a video of a colonoscopy that brought many amused chuckles in the room.



The 3G feature pack includes some minor updates; it detects networks and displays the appropriate icon to alert the user to the speeds they should expect. There's a new language pack that will allow OEMs to ship a device and allow the user to select their language at first boot. In markets such as Hong Kong where Dopod is selling devices where some users want English and some want Chinese – this feature addresses that problem. It's up to the OEM to decide when/how they support this of course, because it requires more ROM space.







There's enhanced auxiliary display support, and new Internet sharing over Bluetooth. A Quick Start wizard is now included, which steps the user through basic device settings such as setting the time (which is surprisingly difficult on a Smartphone). There's a new account set up wizard in Inbox Mobile, with improved auto-detection of email settings (I've been told Microsoft has contracted a third party to manage and update this process, as opposed to the old version which was just an XML file up on a Microsoft server that was updated manually). WPA2 is now supported, and there's a new WiFi connection wizard on the Smartphone. The Pocket PC has improved one-handed support, you can now send vCard over SMS, and you can now save SMS to the SIM card (an important feature for hard-core SMS users). Video will now always go full screen (1.5x and 2x) in Windows Media Player 10 Mobile, and there's smart-dial support for your media: meaning you can start typing the name of the artist you want to listen to, and it will do a real-time filter through all the music. Voice Command has been improved to work with Bluetooth headsets, and they hinted at a new version of Voice Command being released to the public, no doubt based on these improvements.