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Theatrical show of Jonas Hasselberg and Chris Hill

"Microsoft Theatre" was the part of Microsoft´s stand at the ITU conference, that was equipped with big screen and several sitting places for visitors. Each day during the conference some presentations were running in this "theatre". As far as Windows Mobile is concerned there were 2 presentations at the theatre each day: one in the morning and another in the afternoon.

The presentation of the Windows Mobile at the Microsoft Theatre was conducted in this way that first a very lame "movie" about bright features of Windows Mobile was running (around 4 minutes) and then these 2 guys:

... were showing stuff related to Pocket PC and Smartphone respectively. The guy to the left is Chris Hill - a product manager of Pocket PC. The guy to right is Jonas Hasselberg, a product manager of Smartphone.

At the beginning Chris started speaking about Pocket PC:

... and he seemed very cold and very self assured. Anyway: the Pocket PC is already now quite a big market success and Pocket PC is profitable for Microsoft.

Chris underlined among others the fact, that Pocket PC 2003 offers excellent and very easy to use Wi-Fi connectivity. Selecting and using Wi-Fi networks is therefore very easy with Pocket PC:

Chris used in his presentation 2 "Xda II" phones. The first one was used with SDIO Wi-Fi card in it and second was used just as cellphone. It was amazing to observe that "Xda II" offers thus both Wi-Fi and GPRS/GSM communication in one device!

It seemed that Jonas - the smartphone guy - looked at it a little bit with envy:

... what is understandable keeping in mind that Microsoft smartphone still does not have drivers for SDIO Wi-Fi cards.

Then Jonas came out and showed with pride the Orange SPV E200:

... and underlined that it has built-in Bluetooth and built-in camera. It seemed that Jonas is really proud of this E200 phone, but still his presentation seemed a bit less self-assured than this one of Chris. Apparently Jonas failed to convey the power of the smartphone and was a bit intimidated by the "big brother" of smartphone - the Pocket PC. We think that it is nonsense because in long term at least 80% of Microsoft powered cell phones will be smartphones and less than 20% will be Pocket PCs. So again the old stereotype that the Pocket PC is the holy cow in Microsoft mobile devices group, and smartphone is poor little brother, has been confirmed.

Jonas was showing various applications of smartphone, but sometimes, oh, oops, look what happened:

Yes! This very disliked busy egg cursor has not gone away in the new operating system - in Smartphone 2003! Ooops. Too bad. Poor Jonas. He looked a bit uncomfortable at this moment...

Then, quite at the end, the big brother and small brother came together to showcase multiplayer wireless gaming:

... where a version of the same game (Backgammon) for Pocket PC and for smartphone was running and both devices were communicating over cellular network without problems.

All in all, considering also that it took just under 20 minutes, this presentation of Chris and Jonas was quite good (abstracting from the very lame short movie at the beginning). Such highlights as having both Wi-Fi and GPRS/GSM in one cellphone, and having built-in Bluetooth in smartphone were nice points hard to forget. It looks like Chris and Jonas have well earned their trip to Switzerland and have not wasted all the time.