Windows Phone Thoughts: Mobius 2009: Fascinating, But Little That Can Be Shared

Hi there OS X fans! If you're coming to this site from the Fake Steve Jobs link or the Daring Fireball link, I'd encourage you to check out Apple Thoughts and join our community there.

Once again, it's Mobius time! Mobius is an invite-only event, hosted by Microsoft, where the invited guests are shown what Microsoft is doing in the mobile space. The 2009 event was held in downtown Seattle at Pravda Studios. Full disclosure: Microsoft covers our flight and hotel expenses, and keeps us well fed during the event - though there are some attendees that pay their own way to get here, and pay for their own hotel. I'm not one of those people - if a company is willing to pay for me to fly out to see what they're up to, I'll take them up on the offer. It won't change my opinion about what they're showing me.

At every Mobius event I've been to in the past, the content has been a mix of presentations that we can talk about, and some that we can't. This event so far has been radically different - the entire day was made up of presentations that we've agreed not to talk about. There was some truly eye-opening stuff; stuff that reminds me again that so many of the rumours we read about online are utterly and completely false. I think if every blog or news site went back correct the rumours they've been wrong about, they'd be too embarrassed to publish rumours...for at least a day or two. I lump myself in this group as well; hot and highly-speculative rumours are always fun to ponder, but they often bear little resemblance to reality.

Figure 2: Out of the 25 attendees, 13 of them were using OS X. The other 12 were using Windows. Interestingly, many of the Windows users were from Europe or Asia; the vast majority of the OS X users were from the USA. This is the only place on the planet where OS X has 53% market share.

Here's a list of who was in attendance, and the sites the represent:

• Alex, Akihabara News
• Arne Hess, the::unwired
• Chris Ziegler, Engadget Mobile
• Dieter Bohn, Smartphone Experts
• Gianni Carfagno, SoloPalmari.com
• Jenneth Orantia, freelance writer
• Jerome Tranie, MobiFrance
• Derrick Ngan, Pocket PC Channel
• Joel Evans, Geek.com
• Judie Lipsett, Gear Diary
• Leigh Geary, Cool Smartphone
• Lisa Gade, MobileTechReview
• Matt Miller, ZDNet Smartphones & Cell Phones
• Michael Gartenberg, Gartenblog
• Paul O'Brien, MoDaCo.com
• Philip Berne, InfoSync World
• Rafe Blandford, All About Symbian
• Remo Knops, MobilityMinded
• Rich Brome, PhoneScoop
• Ryan Block, GDGT
• Sacha Fuentes, Xataka.com
• Sascha Segan, Gear Log
• Shane Chiang, Mobinauts
• Vincent Nguyen, Slash Gear

After the day of presentations, where each attendee received a 32 GB Zune HD [Affiliate]. It was my first time seeing the platinum Zune HD in person - the colour looks better than I thought. We had an evening of dining and drinks, getting to see some of the interesting pubs in the downtown neighbourhood we're staying in. I don't drink alcohol, but I ate my weight in food that evening. There were some tasty dishes! HTC gave everyone a Touch HD2, which was an unexpected occurrence - I know that I was hoping I'd get a chance to see this Windows Mobile uber-device, but being able to leave with one was a great treat. My initial impressions? It's a large device - perhaps too large for some - but the performance and screen (great gods of pixels, the screen!) is truly fantastic.

That's about it for day one of this event. I'll update this article with further information if there's anything to share - but don't hold your breath; we've been told day two is going to be much like day one in terms of NDA content.