News

Misjudged theme - PocketPC show comes to London in June

Europe's "first conference, exhibition and networking event for the Pocket PC industry, and the enterprises it serves ... " is coming to London June 11-13, at Earls Court exhibition centre. But why only PocketPC devices?

The show is not as big as that makes it sound. It's actually a "co-location" event with Internet World, which is the star show; which means that the show organisers aren't really sticking their necks out. The same goes for the "Internet World Wireless" show and the parallel Enterprise IT event.

Their official line is that this is, in a sense, an established show: "PocketPC London is the European sister to the already established New York event. Now we're taking our relationships with solutions providers, developers, associations and the media from the fast-growth Pocket PC community into Europe."

The mystery, really, is why they've decided to restrict it to one particular platform - the Microsoft one. At the recent pair of developer conferences - one for Microsoft two weeks ago, and one for Symbian last week - it was clearly irksome to exhibitors to have to carefully restrict themselves to the flavour of the week, when most of them have a general interest in mobile and portable systems.

You might be able to understand why Symbian asked exhibitors not to demonstrate rival hardware and you can certainly understand why Microsoft similarly invited the top 20 Symbian developers specifically to a pre-conference breakfast before its portable Windows developer conference; but actively excluding Symbian or Palm from an open conference and exhibition seems daft. Nonetheless, they seem determined:

"Enterprise decision-makers need a forum to learn first-hand about how Pocket PC can impact their productivity and customer relations," the organisers quote Magnus Ahlberg, Marketing Manager, Microsoft EMEA Mobility Group. He continues: "Microsoft has made giant strides in the European marketplace in the last year, offering unmatched functionality, network connectivity and range of enterprise applications to mobile professionals and consumers. The PocketPC London event will address the key issues facing the industry and demonstrate why Pocket PC is increasingly the platform of choice for the mobile computing". Well, perhaps; but there's no obvious need to exclude the others!

Nothing in the seminar programme indicates a Microsoft bias, either. There are four themes:

Business Strategy – where line of business managers can find out what the Pocket PC can do to make their company more efficient, effective and mobile.

IT Strategy – the integration of Pocket PC applications, WLANs, security, corporate portals and more.

Developers Track – hands-on sessions for developers including XML, .Net web services, graphics, database replication, security issues and more.

GPRS - A special seminar stream on GPRS issues will reflect the importance of higher-speed connectivity for a new generation of Pocket PC solutions.

My guess is, this was probably a ploy to attract Microsoft sponsorship - and one which didn't work. They ended up with Ovum as sponsor. But the "theme" was already decided upon.

"After years of hype, the promise of the mobile enterprise is finally dawning. The first applications have passed the early adopter test and the mass market is ramping up to embrace the idea of the mobile workforce," boasts the organiser. But if you check out the complete exhibitor list, you won't find any sign that only PocketPC devices are in this bracket.

We'll be bringing full reports from the show in the second week of June.