Advertisement

Article

Mobile World Congress – Highlights from Day One

James Thornton

James Thornton

  • Updated:

Steve Ballmer at Mobile World Congress BarcelonaToday saw the start of the GSMA Mobile World Congress here in OnSoftware’s home town of Barcelona. The first day of the biggest event in the mobile technology calendar has not disappointed. We’ve spent the day checking out the latest innovation in mobile hardware and software as well as listening to eminent speakers from the industry. Here are some of our software highlights from the first day of the event:

Windows Mobile 6.5: Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer paid a visit to the conference to make three announcements: Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft My Phone, and Windows Marketplace. The new Windows Mobile 6.5 OS was demoed at the show and it certainly looks like an improvement on the previous release. There is a new log-in screen which gives you an at-a-glance view of your missed calls, chat messages and emails. What’s more, MS has revamped the homescreen with a rather strange-looking, text-based interface where you can select features such as email, calendar, pictures, music and fast access to Internet favorites. The apps menu also gets an overhaul, this time with a series of icons arranged in a kind-of honeycomb structure. The most significant change to the applications is the inclusion of the full current version of Internet Explorer on the device (i.e. with the same browsing engine as IE), along with Flash Player Lite.


Windows Mobile 6.5The My Phone service functions in a similar way to Apple’s Mobile Me or Nokia’s Ovi service. It basically lets users share their tasks, photos, music, documents, contacts, etc. between their PC and different devices by providing an online hub for all of this data. The service, which comes with 200Mb of storage space, is a key part of Microsoft’s strategy to drive innovation that brings different media together.

Ballmer also confirmed that both HTC and LG will be announcing Windows Mobile 6.5-based devices this week. All of these devices, and all future handsets supporting the OS (‘Windows phones’ as Microsoft will now call them) will feature the same ‘Start’ button on the hardware that gives you instant access to your most commonly-used tasks and apps.

Palm WebOS: As we told you earlier, the Palm Pre has been officially launched today, along with its slick new WebOS interface. The device got a big thumbs-up from us in terms of both the design of the handset itself and its easy-to-use on-board software. It feels lighter and more compact than the iPhone, and the layered nature of its Operating System makes it very easy to switch between applications. What’s more, WebOS makes Windows Mobile 6.5 look positivitely archaic already.

Cross-platform development: Convergence has been very much one of the key themes of the day and nowhere was this more evident than in the event’s ‘Application Developer Garage’. This panel discussion saw top executives from the likes of Symbian, Adobe and Sun Microsystems address developers about the need to think openly when developing mobile applications. They sited the iPhone as a catalyst for waking up developers to the mobile world and raising the bar for small-screen applications. The experts called on developers to get creative with their software and utilise all of the cool new hardware features of phones, such as accelerometers, heart-beat monitors, and Bluetooth connections, to open up a world of new opportunities.

Windows Mobile 6.5Opera Turbo: In terms of mobile-based Internet browsing, Opera has been leading the field for some time. Its announcement today of a new service called ‘Opera Turbo’ looks set to improve its standing. We were given a demo the system, currently only available as a B2B platform, and were stunned by the speed difference. Even when compared with page rendering times for the super-fast Opera Mobile, Turbo was lightning fast. The technology manages to deliver massively compressed data and yet still present high quality, real-world pages including Flash and Ajax content.

Kaspersky Mobile Security 8.0: We’re living in dangerous times and Kaspersky was keen to emphasise the security dangers for mobile users when we spoke with them. The most interesting feature of the new software is its ‘AntiTheft’ tool. If you have the solution installed and you lose your phone you can use SMS to lock the phone and to permanently clean sensitive data from your device remotely. You can even track down where your phone is thanks to a service called ‘SMS Find’. This not only displays the co-ordinates of your phone, but also gives you a Google Maps link showing you its precise location. Hopefully this will mean you’ll never lose your phone again!

James Thornton

James Thornton

Latest from James Thornton

Editorial Guidelines