SFist Parties With The Techies
SFist hit Mobilefocus at the Fairmont last night. Although a Casablanca theme seemed bizarre for a tech event the food and bevs were good and the booth bimbos were wearing belly dancer outfits, which we figure must appeal to the 18-35 male demographic that most the products were targeted at. We were prepared to declare the bar carved out of ice the highlight of the evening until we screwed up our courage and landed a modeling gig. A hand modeling gig. For Engadget!. Ok, it was unpaid, we have yet to see our picture on the site, and we did approach them. But we got to chat with Ryan Block from Engadget about how confusing the keyboard layout of the Sprint PPC-6700 running Windows Mobile is. Nerd bragging rights, eh?
The crowd was strictly fellow bloggers (they wear black, denim, and leather, with some corduroy to lighten up the look) and analysts (they’re roughly our demographic, but dress stuffier). Even thought it was a local media event the 'attending media' list doesn't include us, Engadget or Gizmodo. Being snubbed isn’t so bad when you’re in such good company.
All the usual corporate suspects were there. Boecha and Mike at OQO 01+ very nice. The device is hott (literally -- the back was warm to the touch). Retails at 1899 for XP, 1999 for XP Pro, will ship with a Linux system on request. We knew that we still weren’t “big time” when Peter Rojas let it slip that he’s already got one of the pre-release OQO's with Windows Tablet PC OS). The Nokia crew pitched us a 'second, going out phone.' (it’ll fit in my purse!?) but sort of skirted the main issues that it has no keys and you can’t play games on it. Strictly for the looks doesn’t really cut it with your celly.
The Microsoft guy showed off the functionality of the Creative Zen Video, but decline to answer about how TiVo's new 'flagging' policy will affect transferring affected shows to the device. The device will run all the flavors of Windows Media and is managed via the Windows Media Player Interface, as it runs Windows Mobile OS. And it seems whenever somebody has a problem, they blame one of the other OEM's (in this case, Creative blames TiVo and Microsoft):
Jim, at local provider Palm, handled our questions about why the Treo 700 is dropping PalmOS very well, saying that it was a way to break into the corporate market dominated by 'Microsoft shops,' and said that it would support things like Exchange Server and Microsoft's other enterprise business management tools. Peter took credit for breaking the story, and showed us his prototype: The nice thing was that Madden 06, another local product, has been ported to PocketPC and Palm OS, though the dude from Palm said they weren't taking any special steps to develop their devices as mobile gaming platforms.
Special thanks to SFist Jackson for translating us into techno-speak