CTIA Fall 2007 Thoughts

CTIA seemed smaller this year. I walked the floor and got a chance to look at pretty much every booth in about half a day. But at the same time the meeting spaces seemed to grow a bit. This was a conference for getting deals made, not as much for putting on flashy shows.

Below are some of my thoughts.

MICROSOFT
Microsoft really came correct this year. Not only did Steve Ballmer get the first advertisement…. er… keynote, but the Widows Mobile booth was packed to the brim every day all day. Their phone lineup was very impressive, and damned if I didn’t want an HTC Tilt after playing with it.

Get this - we were inside the Moscone Center, and the Tilt grabbed a GPS location accurate to within a few blocks, with a lock on time of a few seconds. It displayed the results in Windows Live Search. This was me messing with the device, not a sales rep doing a demo. My mind suddenly drifted to a wonderland of snapping photos and posting them, GPS-tagged, using Shozu as I walked the floor and the streets of San Francisco. This phone could do that - my iPhone had neither the GPS, nor the third-party software to.

But at the same time, Pocket IE sucks so badly, that all the joys I have using a slick browser on the iPhone on a high resolution screen would need to go away if I moved to WinMo. Microsoft - these devices have been using 320×240 screens for years now. I’ve had enough. Figure out how to stick a bigger screen on them. The devices are getting so small now anyway, you could get away with putting bigger batteries in them.

The WinMo devices made me long for third-party apps on my phone again. These iPhone web apps are slick and all, but in a conference packed with mobile phone data users clogging up the networks, waiting for your UI to load over a network before you even get to push a button is unacceptable. I don’t care how efficient your AJAX iPhone twitter app is, you’re not going to beat a native app with your last messages cached, only pushing a small bit of data over the network. And oh how I missed an always-on IM client. Meebo for iPhone is a wonder of modern AJAX, it really is. But it just can’t handle a flaky slow network.

NOKIA
I don’t want to give all the props to Microsoft. Nokia has been doing the third-party app, GPS, 3G thing with the N95 for a while now. But it doesn’t have a keyboard, so it doesn’t get my gadget lust. What’s this with keyboards only on E-series devices Nokia? The hip kids want keyboards too sometimes.

One N device that does have a keyboard is Nokia’s N810 tablet. It really is freaking amazing, but it’s not a phone. You need to hold one to understand how thin and sleek it is relative to what it does. It’s devices like these that get me thinking of moving back to a two-device configuration, with the phone being used as a bluetooth modem. But the whole bluetooth thing breaks down when you want always-on applications. Bluetooth isn’t meant to be on when a device is in hibernate mode, so forget about keeping a persistent connection to IM or brokering email in the background.

The new N95 8GB is killer as well - those N95 screens are really gorgeous, I can’t believe they’re the same resolution (QVGA) of the WinMo phones that I was complaining about earlier. Here’s the thing I want to try with an N95. It apparently supports UPnP. So I could theoretically have it connect to my wireless network when I’m home, and freely pull up videos on the phone with my PS3. I bet if I did that on battery, the phone would be dead in 10 mins, but what a great way to support a standard, and a great payoff in functionality for doing so. Anyone try something like this yet?

FACEBOOK
It’s good that Russ and Mike got to try out their initial FBML goes mobile offering. Yeah, Facebook rushed it. But I still believe in the idea. Dustin honestly seemed excited about mobile, and pushing this stuff out, no matter how alpha it is, shows some real enthusiasm for mobile as a company. So they get the props counter incremented for that move in my book.

Not many people are talking about Facebook’s love fest with RIM and integration with Blackberries. The integration is cool, yeah. But what has been almost COMPLETELY ignored by the media and bloggers is the way they get FB messages to the devices. They piggyback the push email signal! No polling, no extra communication from the device. Saves battery life, and makes any alert reception very very prompt. What an awesome backbone for alert delivery, and it’s the first time I’ve heard of this being used for a third-party app.

MOBITV
These guys keep getting stronger each year. For the last couple CTIA’s the question has been “will IPTV be able to compete with emerging tech like MediaFLO?” The answer this year seems to be “yes!” Browsing their booth, I saw a lot of very mediocre phones running their service very well (that’s a compliment - you can’t just be on high-end phones to win this game). Apparently, they’ve hit the 3 million subscriber mark, and have extended their contract with Sprint. They’re currently trying to get their channel changing time down to 2 seconds to compete with MediaFLO, but they say they’re on track to doing it.

It’s hard to cover all of my CTIA thoughts sitting here after the fact. A lot of the smaller but still cool things get lost in the data compression in my head that happens after every conference. I send a lot of my real-time thoughts to Twitter, but the character limit there is too restricting. Back to Shozu. I would have loved to post pics with thoughts from the show floor. Maybe in Jan, they’ll sneak some better third-party blogging apps onto the iPhone.

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