Mobius Day 2

The second day started off with more attendee demos. I saw some interesting gadgets, including a universal charger from Hong Kong that took a new approach to charging batteries: it had two metal prongs that could be re-positioned to touch the contacts on any battery and charge it. I'm not entirely sure how safe it would be, but it was cool to see a charger that could recharge almost any small battery. Lacking and good gadgets to demo that hadn't already been seen by most of the people in the room, I ended up talking about MotionBox and some of the challenges in shooting and sharing videos online.

Eric Lin from HTC

The first session on day two was presented by Eric Lin from HTC USA. He talked about the difficulty of differentiation among Windows Mobile OEMS - each OEM has the same basic software from Microsoft, access to the same basic hardware technologies, and generally have the same sort of limitations. So how does HTC stand out from everyone else? Lin said that four are popular basic designs: candybar QWERTY, 12-key slider, a slate (just screen), and a screen + QWERTY (the slider). We had a rather spirited discussion about which form-factors consumers really wanted versus what's popular right now. It's my opinion that HTC is focusing too much on chasing Apple's coat-tails and releasing nothing but "touch" devices. HTC has great slate and keyboard slider devices, but they lack a modern QWERTY messenger device, a candybar phone, and a clamshell phone. I used to think that HTCs greatest asset was the choice that users had with the hardware, but I can't think that any more - I want to see HTC go back to making best-in-class devices around specific form-factors. We don't need more "Touch" devices from them right now.

Figure 15: Eric Lin from HTC.

More NDA Stuff

The second session of the day was presented by Microsoft Labs under NDA. All I can say about the session is that what we saw presented first looked quite useful, and I look forward to being able to get my hands on it.

From the Carrier Point of View: T-Mobile

Next up was Beth Goza, now working for T-Mobile. If you recognize that name, it's because Beth used to work for Microsoft and was running Mobius events at one point. Beth took us through a presentation she did in 2007 that walked through the evolution of mobile applications, then launched into a new 2008 presentation that explained what she does at T-Mobile: she helps developers bring their applications to T-Mobile customers. Traditionally it's been difficult for a developer to get their applications into the hands of customers, so T-Mobile has come up with a program to facilitate this called devPartner. They have a revenue forecaster where the developer specifies which devices they're going to develop for, how much they're going to charge, what they estimate their return rates will be, how much network bandwidth they'll use, etc.

Figure 16: Beth Goza from T-Mobile.

The issue of network bandwidth ignited a firestorm of a discussion that focused on the fact that developers who release applications that use data have to pay for that data usage in some fashion, regardless of the fact that the customer is already paying for data with a plan of their own. This "double billing" concept clearly agitated a lot of people in the room, myself included. At first I thought I misunderstood the concept, and that developers would only be billed for network access if the customer using their application didn't already have a data plan, but this billing is above and beyond what the customer is already paying for. I'm glad this is limited to T-Mobile and feature phones, because I can't imagine how stunted the mobile application development scene would be if developers had to pay for data transfers that the customer initiated with their application. If the customer has a data plan, shouldn't any and all data transfers be billed against that? Why hold the developer responsible for that? Sheer lunacy!