Pocket PC Thoughts: Mobius 2005: The Report

Sling Media
Jeremy from Sling Media showed us the Slingbox, a place shifting device. Similar to timeshifting, place shifting allows you to access the content you want, where you want it. The device was launched earlier in 2005, and in Best Buy they sold out across the chain in the first weekend. Their goal is to turn any display device into a TV set – they work on, or have plans to work on, Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Java-based devices, and others. He was careful not to commit to exactly when they'd deliver on those platforms. He wanted to show us the out of box experience, so he factory reset the unit he brought along to demonstrate. The setup was surprisingly simple, although he did have a bit of trouble getting the IR blaster working. The Slingbox uses Universal Plug and Play, so when the user starts the install procedure it automatically discovers the device on the network.


Figure 3: The Slingbox from Sling Media. Apparently I'm going to get sent one - cool! Although I have to admit that timeshifting is more important to me than place shifting, because I don't travel all that often. But I'm sure it will be fun to check out.

They're currently beta testing a PAL version, so in Q1 of next year they plan on having the product available in Europe and other PAL markets. He then showed us a demo of their pre-beta client running on a Windows Mobile Pocket PC. He was connected over WiFi, and while the display was a little choppy, it looked fairly good (the room seemed to be a bandwidth vortex). It has a full screen landscape mode, which looked great, and on the Sprint 6700 Pocket PC Phone Edition he was using for the demo, the keyboard is mapped to the functions of the applications. You can pull up the remote control and change channels and other functions, and generally control most aspects of controlling your remote TV. The Pocket PC client will be a public beta, and cover Windows Mobile 5 and Pocket PC 2003 devices - I got the feeling it was "coming soon".

Jupiter Research
Michael Gartenberg from Jupiter research gave us a presentation that covered the mobile device landscape. He had some interesting statistics based on surveys they had done – 33% of consumers want to carry one device, but surprisingly the bulk of the other 2/3rds were willing to carry two or three devices. It dropped off drastically at four devices, but the results made me raise an eyebrow. So what do people carry? 76% of people are willing to carry mobile phones with them regularly. Second on the list was digital cameras at 34%, matched by laptops at 34%. PDAs with connectivity come in at 19%, followed strangely by portable CD players at 17%. Non-connected PDAs came in at 10%, and portable music players at 7%. What do people use these devices for? 74% of people want telephony – that's a core feature. 28% want email. These change over time as well – in 2004. 74% of people wanted telephony, but it dropped to 64% in 2005. Email jumped from 28% in 2004 to 37% in 2005. That shows a definite shift in how people communicate - phone is still important, but email is becoming increasingly important.

When it comes to music, it's interesting to note how much music most people have – the sweet spot is still 1000 songs. The bulk of users don't have that number mind you, but having enough space for 1000 songs is enough storage for most of users. According to his statistics, I’m in the 2% bracket of having more than 5000 songs. Music has always been binary – you either hear it on the radio (free) or a CD (paid). Gartenberg believes that subscription services can become popular, but they need to be framed properly to the consumer. When it comes to mobile video, 38% of people surveyed were interested in watching full-length movies on a portable media player. That flies in the face of what the mainstream press is saying, but it makes sense to me. This is the same mainstream press that was saying that no one wanted any sort of mobile video – until the iPod Video came out, then it suddenly made sense to them.

The major challenge for mobile devices today is battery power – he brought up the example of the Sony NZ90 which had a surprisingly good camera, but the flash took up so much power that after seven or eight photos with flash, the battery was practically dead. That's also the big challenge with converged devices - if you use up battery life on one task, it compromises the other things you want to do. I have some personal epiphanies about this very subject that I'll cover later.

So what do consumers want? According to Gartenberg, they want small handsets with large colour screens that also play music. Notice the conflict there - small devices with big screens. That's why I think roll-up screens might be the magical solution, but it's many years down the road. The #1 trait is small size, followed by PIM functionality, SMS, email, and large colour screens. Downloading ring tones was important to 21% of people, while taking pictures was important to 19%. Balancing the features is a tricky proposition because there's no perfect device – everything still has compromises.