I just read a new blog entry by my good friend Rob Tiffany. He attended the Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week. Reading his blog it almost feel that we are nowhere yet. The name of this conference about mobile computing is somewhat funny. We are already working on Windows Mobile 6 (!) devices, this conference is only at version 2.0. What is more interesting though are the remarks that Rob made, that the words “Microsoft” and “Windows Mobile” didn’t really ring a bell. As Rob wrote, this is kind of strange, given the fact that there must be lots of Windows Mobile devices out on the street. As a matter of facts, being at airports or just walking the streets, I see more and more people carrying a Windows Mobile phone. Perhaps I am a little biased, since I really started looking for devices that people carry after reading Rob’s blog entry. Maybe here, in the Pacific Northwest where I am currently staying, the majority of people walking with a mobile phone work for Microsoft, therefore carrying Windows Mobile phones. However, I don’t believe that this is entirely true. What strikes me is that we apparently are not taken seriously at this Mobile 2.0 conference. I really wonder why this is. Do we need more advertising and marketing effort? Is Microsoft too much focused on professional use of Windows Mobile devices? I guess what we still need are one or two killer applications that really show the differences, that clearly proof the power of current Windows Mobile devices. For starters, I wrote about one killer application last week. Live Search Mobile is absolutely one of those killer applications. Not only is it available for free, it also brought me exactly where I needed to be this weekend. If you remember last week’s column, I showed a map and route description from my hotel to Mount Rainier. Last week the weather was very bad here, but today it was absolutely gorgeous. So I took my mobile phone powered with Live Search Mobile, and it got me to Mount Rainier without additional maps or the need to ask people where to go. This application simply worked great. Of course this is still sort of a business oriented application. Hopefully we get one or two similar applications, but all focused around entertainment. Some real first class games for instance. If we would have that available and a clever marketing campaign, not only focusing on the power of Windows Mobile devices, but also on the ease of developing applications for those devices, we might be somewhere. After all, if we also focus on developing tools like Visual Studio and how they make it possible to easily create very powerful applications for Windows Mobile devices, we might have more and more developers stepping into this area. It is my bet that Windows Mobile devices can become extremely popular if we have a large number of applications available for these devices. Together with the right marketing effort, the next version of the conference Rob blogged about, might easily be renamed to Mobile 6, with a smile referring to the latest version of Windows Mobile devices.

Maarten Struys