MWC Barcelona 2010 – ComPhones or PhonPuters

What to expect from Going to MWC Barcelona Feb 15th to 18th – ComPhones or PhonPuters


Convergence has been the magic word in the mobile space for the last few
years. Until recently, convergence related to networks infrastructure and
bearers and was only relevant to value added services and voice calls. It
was all about the relationship between circuit switched mobile/fix network
and IP based networks.

The more sophisticated implementations of convergence dealt with seamless
hand-off and service continuity between the two domains.

Today convergence has another new meaning – the convergence of devices!

A couple of years ago we were puzzled by the fact that voice calls are being
made not only over switched networks with a device called a phone, but over
IP using a computer…

Today we are once again puzzled by the compute capabilities and use-cases
introduced by what is still called a phone.

This does not stop with your mobile surfing the net or with multimedia apps
"in your hand", the interesting idea to follow on the show floor this year
is how it all scrolls up to compute intensive capabilities like augmented
reality.

Combining compute power, SW development environments, sensors, UI elements
,broadband and business models which actually talk money is all you need to
light a fire in the developer community. So be sure to expect new
applications and use-cases leveraging these new devices (shall we call them
ComPhones or Phonputers).

For us at GraphTech ,and for any SW engineering experts, it's definitely
good news. The more features and performance you want out of a device , the
smarter your implementation needs to be. This means more engineering to
optimize these device's SW/HW infrastructure, including graphics APIs and
drivers, middleware and UI . It's the kind of work that lights our fire.

If The User is the King – UI is his Crown

The obvious rise in the importance and effort invested in User Interface in the last two years has created a new domain in advanced graphics around optimization of UI implementations.

Here at GraphTech we noticed that significant portion of our high end graphics engineering expertise are hired for UI optimization related projects.

Until not long ago UI was never perceived to be a demanding or risky SW engineering task, we learned its important, we agreed it has to be done with great care to detail and user experience, but never saw it as challenging engineering wise .

Well , to our surprise, a relatively large group of our best engineers are working for over a year on implementing and optimizing the UI design of our customer on his target device , The UI design is so demanding , that we find ourselves bound by the limits of the graphic HW and graphic libraries!

High end Graphics was always reserved for the application, UI is entering this domain very quickly.

We have done many extensions and optimizations, and would appreciate the opportunity to discuss and share with others that have notice the same phenomena.