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We’re back from Mobile World Congress 2010 battered but excited for the upcoming year in smartphones. We had coverage from the show at all six sites. If the above isn’t enough to whet your appetite for Mobile World Congress news, we’ve helpfully collated a list of all our coverage up to this point after the break. There are still a few more posts to come as we empty our memory cards and ponder what we held in out hands out in Barcelona – so stay tuned!
Over the course of the week, myself, Kevin Michaluk, and Phil Nickinson recorded not one, not two, but three Mobile World Congress podcasts. There’s precious little webOS news given Palm’s non-presence at MWC. Still – if you want to know what’s going on in the world of mobile, you could do a lot worse than taking a listen. Here they are for your downloading pleasure, or embedded in flash players after the break!
We heard some big news about Documents To Go Premium today at Mobile World Congress. Big news for other platforms. DocsToGo for iPhone is getting local sync and Google Docs Sync. DocsToGo for Android is getting those sync options and also printing and projector support.
When we asked about an ETA for DocsToGo Premium for webOS, however, DataViz wasn’t able to say, nor even confirm that the first half of 2010 (the last delay) is still the target, although DataViz’s product page still lists "early 2010" as the expected date.
It’s a major bummer, given that Documents To Go Premium is stellar on BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, PalmOS, and Symbian (click the image above to expand). DocsToGo Premium is also the number one paid business app on the iPhone App Store and DataViz has sold over 50,000 premium licenses on the Android Market. DataViz wasn’t this blunt but we will be: a developer’s gotta eat.
Palm simply hasn’t sold enough webOS devices to force developers to sit up, take notice, and feel compelled to adjust their schedules and develop for the platform. We can’t say for sure that other platform priorities have pushed back work on the webOS version – but it wouldn’t shock us and as much as it pains us to say it, you can’t blame a developer for working on what’s hot.
There’s been precious little webOS news here at Mobile World Congress, while Android Central, CrackBerry.com, Nokia Experts, and WMExperts have been on fire – even TiPb will have some news in just a bit. But Akitayo reminded us that Adobe was here and likely showing off Flash – so we headed on over.
As you can see from the video above – it’s working but perhaps isn’t quite ready for prime time yet. Unfortunately, Flash is definitely not confirmed for February (looks like it was a miscommunication at Palm’s SFR launch). All Adobe is saying is ‘First Half of 2010,’ so it’s unclear what’ll happen there. We found that Flash on the Pre seemed to move just a bit quicker than Flash on a Droid – but the Nexus One beat them both.
Yes, that’s webOS 1.4 there on a GSM Palm Pre, near as we can tell. We didn’t spend a ton of time with the device, but a quick glance showed the video recording there, speed not significantly faster than what current webOS devices run at, and the new way of loading cards you can see in the video above.
Adobe is also showing off Air apps, but unfortunately they didn’t have them ready for the Pre yet.
We already knew that Flash is coming to webOS, but today, during an Adobe conference at Moble World Congress, it was announced that Adobe is bring their Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) to smartphones, including webOS.
Adobe’s AIR lets developers create applications based on web programming languages like HTML and javascript, and naturally with support for Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex.
This move by Adobe is part of their efforts to entice developers over, and really it’s quite smart. Developers will only need to make a single AIR application and that will be deployable on all major smartphone platforms.
Keen readers might remember how back in September we reported on how Flash 10.1 would include support multi-touch and accelerometers. Well, evidently Adobe’s continuing down that route and Gizmodo is reporting multi-touch support is present in the Android port at the very least.
From the sounds of it, AIR will be debuting on the Android and will launch on other platforms, including webOS thereafter. This is an interesting announcement to say the least. It’ll definitely be fascinating to see how events unravel from here.
[via: Gizmodo]
This week Smartphone Experts’ Dieter Bohn, Kevin Michaluk, and Phil Nickinson are at Mobile World Congress, covering what’s basically the biggest cell phone show on the planet. Different sites will have different coverage. Palm and Apple aren’t expected to do much here this year, so the bulk of SPE’s coverage will be at sites not called PreCentral.net or TiPb (but don’t forget that TiPb blew up Macworld last week – tons of news there).
So for what’s shaking, keep an eye on Android Central, CrackBerry.com, Nokia Experts, and this year especially keep an eye on WMExperts.
As long as you’re following things, be sure to hit up the twitter feeds for those sites too, as when we have news we want to get out there quickly, we’ll be doing it there.
Meanwhile, Phil, Kevin, and Dieter will record a podcast from time to time, like we did just now on the eve of the craziness at MWC. You know you want to partake of these 17 minutes of smartphone joy. Keep an eye on the above mentioned sites for more!
Download it directly with this link
