The Mobile World Congress 2010
Barcelona was quite rainy and cold this time, but the Mobile World Congress was way cooler than last year. Read on for our our experiences in Barcelona 2010!
Work work work and a free phone
The first day started with us being on two booths at the same time, our normal one and then on the Motorola Android developer meeting where we presented the J2ME Polish Android support. Thankfully this was also in Hall 7 which has been labeled as the "App Planet" this year. In contrast to the last year there was less mobile social community buzz but more tool and service providers such as us. I noticed some mobile payment shops again. Looking back four years of exhibiting at the mobile world congress I almost believe that only we and Spin3 (a gambling provider) have booths at the same place all the time. The rest seems to be in quite a flux. But even we have moved this year two booths further, so that people could find us easier. Tuesday and Wednesday was then business as usual. We met a lot of existing customers and quite a few very interesting new prospects. We talked about J2ME Polish and our soon to be released widget platform Skylight. We discussed problems and possible solutions. On Wednesday Google were giving introductions to Android programming. These were really really basic and somewhat boring but absolutely overcrowded. The reason: at the end of the talk they gave away the Nexus One or the Motorola Droid (CDMA version) for free. Of course almost everyone tried to visit the introduction and so did we 
.
By the way, if you want to take part at the Skylight private beta program, please send us a mail on skylight-at-enough-dot-de. Skylight allows you to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript on any J2ME Polish platform. The cool thing is that you can combine Java and widget programming technologies and target mass market feature phones with this technology.
Industry News
Since we now had four people in Barcelona we had also a little time to look at the cool stuff that other companies did. My personal wow event was the new Windows Mobile (or Windows Phone Series) version. The sad thing was of course that this was already expected so the newness-factor is not that hot, but I like their UI very much:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IOTrqlz4jo
Of course this means that we need to use native Windows Phone UI elements in the future, so far we let J2ME Polish render the UI when we do native ports to Windows Mobile.
Important for developers could be the WAC which is right now only an announcement. Directly beneficial could be Ericsson's estore for web developers.
Goodbye Maemo and Moblin, welcome Meego! Nokia and Intel now officially announced their plans and I'm for one welcome the new Linux overlords! I hope they will add Java support at some point, right now the preferred development environment is QT.
Last but not least Samsung showed their first Bada enabled phone: Wave. It's expected to ship in April. We have already done a first commercial project with the Bada platform, we think it has some good potential but its security restrictions are somewhat mad, you even need to specify a right to decode images.
WIPJam
On Thursday there was the WIPJam - basically a meeting place for mobile developers to discuss and socialize. At this event we missed our demonstration slot - of course this was in no way our fault. The day before WIP had organized a party and we made good use of that. So it's WIP's fault, not ours . Anyhow, we arrived early enough to bring in the new edition of the Developer's Guide to the Galaxy which was well received. Andre from our team also took part at the WIPJam Code Smackdown - this was a challenge to code a mobile application that is social and useful for WIPJam participants. Next to Enough Software also Mosync (formerly known as Mobile Sorcery), Nokia QT, a iPhone dev company which name I forgot and OMTP took part. Andre coded a small little app that allows you to take photos and uploads them to Twitpic and additionally sends a Twitter update about the new photo. At the same time it updates the photo list from Twitpic for your viewing pleasure. The code itself is 350 lines of Java and CSS code and the app's running on J2ME, Android and BlackBerry. The WIPJam crowd then decided who should be the winner - and we won! Thanks everyone! This app will be a sample app in the next J2ME Polish release, by the way. To watch images, visit the http://twitpic.com/photos/MWCsmackdown.
J2ME Polish winner twitpic app
See you next year
So the #mwc2010 was really cool again, looking forward to next year's one! Oh, and make sure to register for the next WIPJam early - there's one at the CTIA and one at the CommunicAsia