July 2nd, 2008 by Mordy Gilden
Last week, MoPocket creator Justin Oberman and I were invited to visit the Digital Experience! show here in New York.
In addition to the new products being showcased by some big names at the event, there were also a few new start ups and fresh faces, which is always nice to see.
Here’s just a few of the things I found interesting at the show:
Sony Ericsson - Despite years of fame creating touch screen smartphones based on Symbian UIQ, SE’s new Xperia handset marks the manufacturer’s first venture into the world of Windows Mobile.
The phone appears to be a solid offering: It’s a nice and narrow in your hand, has a sharp high resolution screen worthy of Sony’s branding, and a slightly angled slide out keyboard, that tilts the screen upward similar to certain HTC devices. Its also got a nifty UI add on that uses rotating 3D screens called “panels”.
But the similarity to HTC devices is not without reason… The word on the street is that the Xperia was in fact designed by HTC for Sony Ericsson. Its no secret that HTC built most of the early PDA devices to be rebranded by other names (Dell Axim X5, HP 2125, MDA, XDA, SDA, all the old Imate and Qtek handsets, even the original Palm Treo…), however I thought they had stopped doing that a year ago when their own branding started to appear on their devices, and cut their ties with Imate and Qtek. This should be interesting.
Nokia - Nokia always has a couple of new and interesting handsets up its collective sleeves. The one that had the most attention at their table was the E71, a Symbian S60 based handset for the people who share their phones for work and business. 
The really interesting thing about this handset is the way it switches modes between “work” and “personal”.
In Work mode, the phone offers a very straight forward and efficient UI, optimized for business features such as email and calendar monitoring.
But when the work day is done, you can switch modes to a more playful graphics-oriented personal UI. This concept is targeted to people who normally carry two handsets, one for work and one for personal. Sadly, the phone still only supports a single SIM and therefore does not replace having two separate phone numbers.
…yet. I noticed that was the first question a lot of people asked when looking at the phone, and I think that it would be very clever of Nokia to incorporate that into their next design.
Either way, after handling this device for a few minutes, Justin was convinced this will be his next personal handset.
HTC - The undisputed king of the Windows Mobile world was there too, showing off their new HTC Diamond and TouchFlo 3D interface.
I have to admit, the new TouchFlo is nice and very pretty on the 640×480 VGA display, but perhaps less intuitive than the old Biotouch Cube found on the HTC Touch. Still this phone is chock full of interesting new hardware for an HTC device, including a touch scroll wheel around the D-pad (similar to the touch circle on the original iPods) which can be used to zoom in and out of images, and motion sensing technology to detect landscape vs portrait orientation which might also bear striking resemblance to another Apple device. The motion sensing here however, is so good that it actually comes with a little labyrinth game in which you must tilt the phone in different directions to move a marble through a maze using simulated gravity. Very cool!
Sadly, in the process of trying to emulate Apple’s marketing success, they removed the external memory slot. That makes this the first device in HTC’s history to do this as far as I know.
Another shocker was that one of the HTC representatives demonstrating the phone was none other than Eric Lin of Phonescoop fame. It was a familiar face from the phone review world that I didn’t expect to see (I’ve already blogged about meeting him on my personal blog found here).
Sprint - Sprint is really pushing the Samsung Instinct as their flagship device to directly combat the iPhone. I have to admit, I found a lot of their marketing very entertaining (especially their videos promoting it as a movie), but Apple is a powerful marketing machine that will take a lot more than a great phone and clever ads to beat.
As far as the hardware goes however, I was surprised to find that the UI gives you a vibrating feedback when you tap the screen. While this still can’t replace hardware buttons for tactile feedback, it does make tapping the screen a lot more of a pleasure to use on a device that has no buttons at all. You can feel when you’ve pressed something, and that’s definitely a step in the right direction for this genre of device.
Looking forward to what comes out next…
