Finally arrived back in NYC after attending the Mobius 2002 conference in Seattle, where Microsoft gave me and the editors of a few dozen PDA and cellphone websites a sneakpeak at what Redmond has on the horizon for mobile computing. We got to check out the new Pocket PC Phone edition, Tablet PCs, and Smart Displays. But what’s really gonna shake things up is their Smartphone platform, which is basically a version of the Pocket PC OS for cellphones. The one they showed us had a great looking 170×220 color screen, 16MB of RAM, 32MB of flash ROM, an SD expansion slot, and had MSN Messenger, a mobile version of Outlook, an Internet Explorer browser, and Windows Media Player software built-in. No touch screen though, and there’s no way to upload applications except through your service provider. Not sure though if everyone is going to feel entirely comfortable having a Microsoft OS on their cellphone (hopefully Smartphones won’t crash as often as PCs do). Those reservations aside, it looks like every other cellphone company will be playing catch-up very soon, since these Smartphones are due to hit by the end of the year and are going to make nearly every other cellphone-based OS look absolutely primitive.
