Mobius Seattle 2008: SE, MWg, and HTC show off their devices

I was very pleased to be invited to the first Mobius event of 2008, that is actually being held here in the Seattle area. Thus, I had no travel to get to Mobius and that may have made the decision to invite me to this event even easier for the organizers. I picked up my buddy Joel from Geek.com at the airport and then we headed over to Fry's for a little shopping. I bought Mario Kart for the Wii and an extra steering wheel and then we raced each other for about 20 minutes. Lots of my Twitter buddies are sharing codes for the cool online game play functionality and I plan to play with friends all over the world this weekend.

Opening reception: The Mobius event kicked off as usual with an evening reception at the hotel library, Hotel 1000, where the event is being held in downtown Seattle.

Five of the 21 attendees at this event are new to the Mobius group. The attendees and their sites are listed below:

• Joel Evans, Geek.com
• Paul O'Brien, MoDaCo.com
• Arne Hess, The Unwired
• Ryan Block, Engadget
• Judie Lipsett, Gear Diary
• Rich Brome, PhoneScoop
• Jason Dunn, Thoughts Media
• Michael Oryl, Mobile Burn
• Lisa Gade, MobileTechReview
• Viroon Vichianwattanachai, Thai-G.com
• Ed Hardy, Brighthand
• Sascha Segan, Gear Log
• Tadd Rosenfield, MSMobiles
• Pressian Karakostov, Phonearena.com
• G-A Gay, Akihabara News
• Derrick Ngan, Pocket PC.com HK
• Lim Beng Sun, MyPDACafe
• Chiang , Mobile01.com
• Diego Magnani, Windows Mobile Italy
• Sacha Fuentes, Xataka.com
• Matt Miller, ZDNet Mobile Gadgeteer

It was great, as always, to meet new friends and talk with old friends at the reception. John gave a short welcome speech to all and then asked us who made the first flip phone in the U.S. The prize was a 4GB Zune and no one was getting the right answer so he said it is three letters, ends in E, and starts with G. Lots of folks then shouted out GTE and John threw the Zune my way, but I heard Rich Brome shout it before that and passed it back to him. Folks from the Microsoft hardware group gave each of us a wireless mouse and webcam on the way out the door. Several of us then went down to the hotel restaurant for a quick bite before retiring for the evening. I personally then drove the 45 miles home to sleep for a few hours before returning for the next full day.

Day One: The day kicked off with John laying out the ground rules and showing the Agenda for the next 2 days. He then did a quick run through several devices, including devices running Windows Mobile 6.1. We saw devices from Velocity Mobile, ASUS, LG, Toshiba, and more. I will be posting an image gallery with my final wrap up article this weekend.

We then heard from Microsoft VP of Development, Todd Warren,who talked a bit about the current focus on the user experience and the platform. He cleared up some of my beliefs on the Windows Update utility found on device and stated that it was primarily designed for security updates, but so far this has not been needed. It was also designed to allow 6.0 devices to update to 6.1 without disturbing OEM drivers. Still need agreements between OEM, wireless carriers, and Microsoft to update with this mechanism, but the utility has shortened the process by 6-8 weeks.

Next each attendee went to the front of the room to show off their favorite device or application. I showed my Celio REDFLY Mobile Companion, connected via Bluetooth to the HTC Advantage and the T-Mobile Shadow with the Boxwave extended battery.

Tim Richardson and Chris Shannon then talked and sought feedback on Vista and Apple. It was a rather lively discussion and I was a bit surprised by the results of the informal poll that showed most were generally happy with Vista with many running it on Mac hardware.

The same Sony Ericsson rep I saw at Mobile World Congress gave us a detailed walk through of the XPERIA X1. XPERIA is a new line of devices and is not necessarily limited to just Windows Mobile. SE wants to provide a Premium Experience of Energized Communication with the device. The Panel technology is the major differentiator betweeen other WM OEM/ODMs. It was interesting to hear that Google worked with SE to create the Google panel. The hardware is very nice with the keyboard, display, and 256 MB RAM. No release information was given, but I look forward to -the release.

Roger Butterworth from MWg then talked to us about their history and current devices. MWg was created when Expansys bought O2 Asia and their new Zinc II actually seems like a decent device. The flat keyboard will take some getting used to, but the device felt solid in my hand. It will be interesting to see how this new player does in the competitive mobile market.

Mobius alumni, eric lin, then showed us the new HTC Diamond and let us play a bit with the device. It has some sweet UI features and should do quite well with its excellent user experience. I like the turn over to silence the ringer, custom Opera browser, and TouchFLO 3D interface. HTC will be sending them to us for review soon. eric closed by handing us each our own HTC Advantage 7510! Check my unboxing and first impressions article for more on this device.

We then all went to a nice dinner and talked about mobility. Judie, Joel, Ed, and I came back to my room to setup our Advantage devices and chat some more. Check out Gear Diary for lots more coverage of today's events.