Last night, as is the custom, we had an informal meet & greet. Today marked the first day of actual Mobius meetings…and we jumped right in.

John Starkweather gave us a formal introduction as he welcomed us to the 2008 Seattle Mobius, teased us with a quick REDFLY demo, and then jumped right into a Windows Mobile 6.1 walk-through and discussion.

Next John dropped a collection of phones around the room, so that we could ooh and ahh over the ones we hadn’t seen yet…which for me was most of them. Other than the i-mate Ultimate devices and the Toshiba G900, which we have covered before, most of these devices were from foreign markets. Each of the following pictures is a thumbnail, click on it to see the much larger photos. Can you identify all of them?

While we were completely distracted by this chain of eye-candy that had started passing under our noses, Todd Warren, from the Windows Mobile team, began speaking about Windows Mobile and matters pertaining to 6.0 and 6.1. He also gave an extensive discussion on challenges the converged mobile phone platform has been facing, and then spend a good 30 minutes doing an admirable job of fielding some completely off the cuff questions from our group.

Next were group introductions, where each of us took turns discussing our devices. As always, it was interesting to see what gear each person had brought along. I won’t discuss what the others were carrying since that’s a bit of an intrusion, but I will talk about the device I have been using for the past few months as my main phone: the Vertu Ascent. What? I’ve been using a dumb-phone? Yes…and with what has felt like a very good reason. I finally realized that I’ve been suffering from device burnout for a little while; one of the problems was that most of the converged devices I was using were really great data managers, great GPS devices, great eReaders, great texting devices, great…whatever; but they weren’t necessarily great phones. Perhaps it was my experience with the Sprint Mogul that really pushed me over the edge, but when I switched to AT&T, the SIM card with my main number went into a Vertu that one of our readers had sent me to try out. Believe it or not, I came to really appreciate the fact that this phone is a really great phone. I guess that I needed to get back to the point where I felt the frustration of not having my data with me when away from my desk, where I missed my favorite games, and where I missed being able to load the programs I like to use, and this was actually the best way to do it. I am ready to go back to a smartphone now, I’m just not sure which one it will be. or if it will be my only device.

Tim RIchardson and Chris Shannon, both product managers with Microsoft came to get our perspective on the MacOS / Vista debate. They wanted feedback on what should be changed in Windows. We spent a lot of time on this as you can imagine…then it was lunchtime. More soon…;-)