Microsoft Student Partners

A quick bit of back story: Two of the MSPs at the bootcamp gave a presentation where they stated that their old, reliable phones were superior to modern smartphones because they were nearly indestructible. To prove this point, they then proceeded to throw their phones at the ground (which promptly smashed (although were later fixed)).

This is just a quick post to prove those two MSPs wrong.

Engadget has an article on the Nautiz X5: A phone that can survive being trapped in a pressurised, dust filled chamber, dropped from 1.8m and sprayed with a garden hose (IPX6 Dust and IPX5 Water Rating). That said, you don’t have to compromise on any performance either; the Nautiz X5 is running Windows Mobile 6.1 (yay!) on an 806Mhz processor with 512Mb of flash and 256Mb of RAM along with all connectivity you’ve come to expect from a WinMo phone (Bluetooth, Wifi b\g, HSDPA, IrDA and GPS). To top it off, the phone also has a full VGA touch screen, a MicroSD card slot, 3MP camera, a 4400mAh battery and a barcode scanner (with optional 2D imager!).

So there you are: You can have all the features of a modern WinMo phone, while still being able to throw it at people.

– Daniel
Curtin MSP

The rumors had been bouncing around since Day 1. Its name had been whispered over lunch tables around TechEd. Circled by many on their personal timetable pages as a “Do Not Miss” event, WAMSP brings you first hand coverage from…

Mobile Smackdown!

Hannibal, Murdoch, B.A. Baracus and of course, face (i.e. the M-Team), took us on a wild ride around the current world of Windows Mobile devices, while injecting a bit of team spirit with swag throwers around the room and heaps of mini-mobile games that lead to giveaways of high-end devices such as the new Palm Treo and HTC Touch Diamond.

The M-Team:

And Colonel Decker even made an appearance:

Colonel Decker was also in on the party, travelling towards the M-Team’s location in realtime.

Between different demos people from the audience were brought up for miscellaneous games including, mobile Guitar Hero 3, eating cat food (!!!) for a mobile phone (3), and even a bench pressing competition. Who said that geeks can’t do push ups?

Congrats to all those who won things – especially the guys who ate the strudel & catfood and especially the guys who did the pushups and dispelled any myths about geeks being out of shape (I bet some of them are *cough* Wii Fit *cough* owners).

Some of the demo’ed devices (the on-screen interfaces reflect what is happening on the actual device):

One thing I was particularly impressed with was the lack of targeted competition bashing. There were small jabs, such as the consumption of apple & blackberry strudel, little reminders that sometimes it’s nice to be able to replace a battery and a small video about Google’s Android, but all in all it was kept friendly and humorous. Everyone was amicable – when someone emailed in to participate in a challenge and left the footer “Sent from my iPhone”, this was taken extremely well by the presenters. It’s nice to participate in an extremely fun (and loud) presentation about products and their capabilities rather than a clear competition bashing fest.

Google take a beating from CNet

There was also a viewing of the cool unboxing of the Omnia i900. Not a Microsoft movie (or Samsung) as such, but well worth the watch.

Kudos go out to the smackdown team (Windows Mobile in Australia, Rog42) as well who organised a massively awesome session with giveaways that literally, rained down from the sky!

Confused yet?

Often an issue when showing off aspects or presenting a demo with Windows Mobile is that the screen is too small, and you have to move your hand over the screen in order to interact with the device (making a PDA->Camera->Projector combination difficult), while devices with TV out are extremely rare (although the HTC Touch Diamond and Touch Pro will both have HTC’s extUSB, which has USB, Audio and TV Out).

So the solution? My Mobiler. This allows you to not only display the contents of your PDA’s screen on your computer, put also control it from there as well. It also features screen scaling and by IP or ActiveSync connection (making wired or wireless both options). Best of all it has a small resource footprint and is free!

I also use My Mobiler when adding in a number of new contacts or calendar items as it is a lot easier to do via my PC than my PDA (even though my PDA does have a full 50-something key keyboard).

So, My Mobiler  – De-Mobilising Windows Mobile and Re-Mobilising your Mobile demos and Mobile’s data!

- Daniel
Curtin MSP

I came across an interesting thing today while wandering around the web (as you do…).

Firstly, the new version of Silverlight, as well as the announcement and release of Silverlight for Series 60 Symbian phones. Even though the Silverlight site claims that Silverlight is “cross-device” the only devices it is being offered on is PC and Symbian phones – what happened to PDA’s? Why would Microsoft release Silverlight to a competitor (ie the Symbian developers) when they haven’t released it on their own devices?

To solve this conundrum, I decided to visit the Windows Mobile Developer Centre to see if there was a beta of Silverlight or, in the least, some sort of announcement. Then I noticed the kicker: there is a RSS Feed collator box on the homepage entitled “Rich Internet Applications” that is pulling no feeds, though it has the cryptic message of “The ability to create Rich Internet Applications on the Windows Mobile platform is coming soon. Stay tuned…”.

Silverlight on Windows Mobile; it would defiantly bring both of these platforms to the next level – and make it that much better for developers.

- Daniel
Curtin MSP

UPDATE:

It appears that Microsoft did announce Silverlight 1 for Windows Mobile: http://silverlight.net/learn/mobile.aspx
Still, this doesn’t decrease the prospect of how cool it will be.

Thanks to Jim Wilson (http://www.pluralsight.com/blogs/jimw/) for pointing this out.