Kevin Daly
05-06-2003, 08:36 AM
I attended the launch event here in Wellington (the capital of the great and much-farther-from-Australia-than-you-think nation of New Zealand) today. Much stuff of interest, including quite a lot about development for mobile devices. I derived some satisfaction from the fact that the average level of familiarity of the audience with the topic seemed quite low, which suggests that there isn't too much local competition yet (other than from the guys at Orbiz, who have a huge head start).
I had my first look at a smartphone in the er, flesh?...They won't be released here until later in the year, apparently through Vodafone, which means they'll be GSM/GPRS devices (we have both a GSM and CDMA network here, largely because Telecom New Zealand is mostly owned by a consortium of US telcos...or possibly just Bell South by now, I lost track while out of the country for a few years). It's to be hoped that Vodafone actually bothers to do some marketing this time, unlike the way they've ignored the QTek 1010 (XDA) since releasing it. The phone was quite a bit less bulky than I had expected. It was actually running a beta version of the smartphone version of the Compact Framework (some people get all the neat toys), although not doing anything much with it at the time.
Lukas Svoboda from Orbiz gave a very well-presented and quite detailed exposition of the development options for various types of mobile devices (mostly concentrating on PDAs and Smartphones) with VS.NET 2003, i.e. Mobile Web Forms and the Compact Framework, and when you would use each.
There's something oddly seductive about developing for the Compact Framework (much like the peculiar, almost Zen charm of XSLT, or is that just me?) - it should be frustrating and frankly annoying compared with desktop development, given the limited nature of the hardware and the reduced toolset. And yet I find it a lot more fun, and intrinsically more satisfying.
Just one of those things.
PS. The keynote was given by Bob McDowell, Corporate Vice President of Business Productivity at Microsoft. It's great to hear a speech from someone at Microsoft who doesn't sound like he's got this batch of Kool-Aid he'd really like you to try...
Well worth the ttrouble of getting up at an ungodly hour of the morning.
I had my first look at a smartphone in the er, flesh?...They won't be released here until later in the year, apparently through Vodafone, which means they'll be GSM/GPRS devices (we have both a GSM and CDMA network here, largely because Telecom New Zealand is mostly owned by a consortium of US telcos...or possibly just Bell South by now, I lost track while out of the country for a few years). It's to be hoped that Vodafone actually bothers to do some marketing this time, unlike the way they've ignored the QTek 1010 (XDA) since releasing it. The phone was quite a bit less bulky than I had expected. It was actually running a beta version of the smartphone version of the Compact Framework (some people get all the neat toys), although not doing anything much with it at the time.
Lukas Svoboda from Orbiz gave a very well-presented and quite detailed exposition of the development options for various types of mobile devices (mostly concentrating on PDAs and Smartphones) with VS.NET 2003, i.e. Mobile Web Forms and the Compact Framework, and when you would use each.
There's something oddly seductive about developing for the Compact Framework (much like the peculiar, almost Zen charm of XSLT, or is that just me?) - it should be frustrating and frankly annoying compared with desktop development, given the limited nature of the hardware and the reduced toolset. And yet I find it a lot more fun, and intrinsically more satisfying.
Just one of those things.
PS. The keynote was given by Bob McDowell, Corporate Vice President of Business Productivity at Microsoft. It's great to hear a speech from someone at Microsoft who doesn't sound like he's got this batch of Kool-Aid he'd really like you to try...
Well worth the ttrouble of getting up at an ungodly hour of the morning.