Ken's Blog | Windows Mobile 5.0 (yep, took MS 5 tries)

Thursday, 12. May 2005

Windows Mobile 5.0 (yep, took MS 5 tries)05/12/2005 08:37 PM

We all know it takes MS until version 2.0 to get things mostly right, but it seems like it took them until version 5.0 to get Windows Mobile mostly right. Check out the demos from Bill Gates' Keynote from the Microsoft Mobile & Embedded Developers Conference in Las Vegas (you can just skip over Bill's monotone zzzz speech and skip right to the infomercial demo boys

. Because they can do whatever they want with their own APIs, they've added a bunch of nifty features that we won't see in the design-by-committee J2ME APIs for a while: displaying status of playing MP3s in your app, simple calling of people in your contact list, simple access to a local database, APIs for talking wireless (bluetooth, wifi), USB, ActiveSync, etc. in the .Net Compact Framework. The demos of the MDA IV (a.k.a. UTC Universal) and Samsung MP3 phone were cool, especially the jogging application that tracked your statistics by talking to a bluetooth GPS receiver; that's something we'll unfortunately never see on a Linux-based phone because there aren't any GPS navigation applications for it AFAIK.

Note to MS and UTC on the MDA IV: if you really want to make this a BlackBerry Killer as it can be, figure out how to drop the price! I've heard rumors of initial pricing of $1500 and if we get lucky, we *might* see it down to $800 within a year. It has to be priced around $300 w/ a contract to be a BB Killer...

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