MWC wrap-up: my favorite devices
While sitting in the airport waiting for my flight home from Mobile World Congress I thought it was a good idea to sum up some of my favorite MWC announcements. One thing that definitely stood out was Android. The little green robot was everywhere! Google provided all their partners with Android candy and a robot display. This was also the first time that Google had a booth at MWC and it was the talk of the town! It was one of the biggest booths on the show floor and was always crowded. I’m guessing the slide and the giveaways had something to do with that.
Google asked a bunch of developers and partners to showcase their Android app on their booth and I think that really worked. Adobe partner Condé Nast showed off Wired Magazine and The New Yorker on a Motorola Xoom on the Android booth. The electronic versions of Wired and The New Yorker are built with Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite.
MWC was full of tablets. The Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the LG OptimusPad all look very interesting. NVidia even showed the LG OptimusPad with Flash Player 10.2 on Honeycomb! My favorite was definitely the HTC Flyer. Well… That and the PlayBook.
I really like the HTC Sense UI and HTC seems to have done a fantastic job at building a tablet specific version of the Sense UI. Sadly they were only showing it behind glass so they probably still have a bit of work to do. The specs look great though and this is high on my wish list. I also like BlackBerry’s PlayBook. RIM made a balsy move by opting for a brand new OS instead of picking one that already exists. And you know what… It works… The PlayBook is incredibly fast and the UI brings a nice breath of fresh air to the soon to be crowded tablet market. It’s completely different from anything else on the market. I also like the touch enabled bezel on the PlayBook.
There were also plenty of new smartphones at MWC. The ones that really popped out were the Samsung Galaxy S2, the LG Optimus 2X and the HTC Incredible S. The Galaxy S2 is incredibly light. It’s so light that it felt like there was no battery inside. The LG Optimus 2X is also very light and it runs on NVidia’s Tegra 2 making it incredibly fast. My favorite was again an HTC device. The Incredible S looks more or less like what I have in my Desire HD except that it’s faster and has a front facing camera.
Oh… I should probably say that all of the devices mentioned in this post have Flash Player preinstalled and there were dozens of other devices that also come with Flash Player preinstalled. These are just my favorites. It’s been an amazing show and I already look forward to next year’s edition.
I wish I was at CES. Get ready for a ton of new devices!
It’s probably every gadget freak’s dream to go CES in Las Vegas. Last year I “happened” to be in Vegas as a tourist during CES and so obviously I also visited the Consumer Electronics Show. While last year was mostly about 3D and Internet connected TVs this year we’ll see a whole range of new tablets being introduced. Some analysts are even saying that no less than 70 new tablets will see the daylight at CES.
We already saw teasers from Motorola and Vizio. Various techblogs are reporting on rumors about new tablets from Toshiba, LG, HTC, HP, Samsung, and more… You can already feel the buzz, can’t you?
Now wouldn’t it be cool if there was this one technology that could work on all those different tablets? Well… As it turns out, there is! No no… I’m not actually confirming anything here. I’m just saying that there is a technology out there that does run on multiple devices. You’ll have to wait and see which new devices will support the Flash Platform… That said… You do know that just about everyone is part of the Open Screen Project, right?
It’s going to be a great year for Flash developers! Flash on!
10 leading CEOs discuss the Open Screen Project and Flash
CEOs from ARM, Broadcom, DoCoMo, Google, HTC, Motorola, NVIDIA, Palm, QUALCOMM, and RIM talk about how they’re bringing Flash Platform technologies to their devices and platforms as part of the Open Screen Project and why they think it’s important to have Flash on their devices and platforms.
Adobe and HTC Bring Flash Platform to Android
There’s been a lot of buzz about Flash on mobile devices the last couple of days and today HTC announces the release of the first Flash enabled Android phone. This HTC Hero delivers a more complete Web browsing experience and provides access to a broad variety of Flash technology based content available on the Web today. Users can browse and discover a broad set of Web content and applications not supported by mobile phones in the past. People can also view YouTube videos using Flash technology, and enable full screen viewing mode by simply double tapping the screen.
The HTC Hero delivers powerful, compatible video playback performance using Flash technology, and interactive content enabled by ActionScript 2.0. Users can enjoy and navigate through Web videos using intuitive video controls. With progressive streaming of large MP3 audio files from a Web server and the local file storage, the HTC Hero provides a seamless audio experience. Support for Sorenson and On2 VP6 codecs enables higher quality video and playback of existing Web content.
This is also a very important step towards full Web browsing with Flash Player 10 on mobile phones in the future.
Check out a demo of the HTC Hero on http://adobe.com/go/htchero. I can’t wait to get my hands on one!
Read more on Mark Doherty’s blog.
Flash on!
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