Windows Phone Thoughts: Mobius 2006 Thailand: Day One

After a short break, Nick White took over and gave a presentation on Windows Vista. Having been a part of the Featured Communities group, I've sat through a lot of Windows Vista presentations, so much of what Nick talked about wasn't new. Vista does have some excellent features though – I was particularly pleased to hear that the Vista search indexer would index Outlook data without Outlook needing to be open. That's a big improvement over the current Windows Desktop Search that I'm using on my PC today. The Aero Glass features are cool, though Intel will have to release a graphics chipset that doesn't suck for us laptop owners to ever use Aero Glass properly. Especially on thin and light laptops that are geared towards maximizing battery life, ATI and NVIDIA chipsets capable of running Aero Glass are scarce. Nick showed us a demonstration of Windows Presentation Foundation using a real-world example from the New York Times. It was essentially an offline magazine that reminded me of Zinio – very smooth presentation, great user interaction, that partially replicates the experience of reading a newspaper. Windows Sideshow was presented, which is a great concept, but until Microsoft ships Vista no OEM can ship a laptop that has this feature.

The device story for Windows Vista is something most people in the room cared about. Nick started off by demonstrating how Vista works with an iRiver Clix. The initial sync bombed out – the perils of beta software it seems.

















Derek Synder went into a demo of the Windows Mobile Device Center – I really like what I'm seeing with this client, though I'm unclear on how much ActiveSync code is behind the scenes. I dearly hope the answer is none, and this is the "fresh start" we've been begging for since 2000. ActiveSync will not install on Windows Vista, and in fact the Windows Mobile Device Center will not be installed in Vista by default – it will be downloaded as a Windows Update when the machine detects a Windows Mobile device. That seems particularly non-user friendly, but the reason for it seems related to antitrust issues and concerns over including too much in Vista. Windows Mobile 2003, 2003 SE, and Windows Mobile 5 devices will be supported by the Windows Mobile Device Center. I'm unsure of how upset this will make some people – if someone is using a an original Pocket PC or Pocket PC 2002 device, are they the kind of person that will immediately want to upgrade to Windows Vista? Or will they continue to use Windows XP and an older device?