Smartphone Thoughts: Mobius 2006 Thailand: Day One

Derek next shows a traffic monitoring tool called Inrix. It supports the most densely populated cities in the United States. It has a predictive model where you can jump forward in 15 minute increments and it will show you how traffic density goes up or down based on historical data.



What really got my attention was the demonstration of the Xbox Live client running on a Smartphone � I've read about it of course, but never seen it demonstrated in person. It looks excellent, and while fairly simple in functionality, I can definitely see a use for it. In essence, it's a simple way for you to add friends to your Xbox Live account using your Windows Mobile device. I for one would use this, because my current method of adding people to my Xbox Live account is to print out a list of gamer tags and walk up to my Xbox to add them. Very lame. Sadly, there's still no release date for this application which is really frustrating � Microsoft has been talking about this application for months, yet it seems no closer to release. This is largely why companies like Google constantly beat Microsoft to market with their products.









To get to 80% of the smartphone market, you have to design for over 100 phones. Developers take note: Microsoft has released Patterns & Practices: Mobile Client Software Factory. It's a Visual Studio software tool (a set of DLLs to be precise) that allows developers to quickly and easily develop applications that can scale and adapt to multiple screen resolutions (both square and rectangular screens). Not being a developer, I can't fully appreciate this release, but it looks like a great step forward.