Well they hug their Pocket PC of course….. errr ok, well I hope not. This topic came from noticing some funny email signatures today:
“Have you hugged your Pocket PC today?”
“Smart People Carry a Smart Device Running a Smart OS, but Use Your Blackberry if you must”
I particularly love the second one – it so highlights the state of affair when it comes to corporate adoption of mobile devices. Unfortunately a large number of organisations roll out (mandate) Blackberry devices without realising that they can get the same effect from using the much superior Windows Mobile devices. The added benefits from the Windows Mobile platform aren’t limited to those organisation wishing to do their own application development – the integration with Exchange 2007 provides simple device management that removes the need to call your system administrator at 3am in the morning when you loose your device! Going forward the platform is going to move from strength to strength with better management and better enterprise integration, making it an obvious choice when it comes to total cost of ownership.
While we are talking about the Windows Mobile platform I would like to highlight the recently revamped Windows Mobile Developer Center on MSDN. This will include content on
- .NET Compact Framework
- SQL Server Compact Edition (SSCE)
- C++
- Device Driver Development
- Mobile Games
- Mobile Web + AJAX
- Windows Mobile SDK
(As some of you will have guessed one of the future directions of mobile development will be a logical extension of the move in the web space to rich applications. Enter Silverlight – can you see where a rich user experience, with offline capabilities would be useful in a mobile world?)