Having seen a few demos in my time, and someone sent me a link to this one. What impressed me about this was how powerful a technology demo it was (from UK-based Antix Labs – http://antixlabs.com. A mobile version of Sim City (a well known branded game) was running on PC, and this was sent via bluetooth to a Windows Mobile phone. OK, so far so good, and pretty impressive.
The game was then bluetoothed from the Windows Mobile phone to a Symbian phone, and then played on that!! Wow!
What I found so impressive, was that this was the binary of a branded C++ game (not a Java game) that ran on 3 different platforms – yep, you heard me, the same binary!! I.e. not a different build version for the operating system. Now, maybe someone has seen a demo like that before, but I never have. You could just see how this could set the mobile gaming scene alight.
I was very privileged to be invited by Microsoft’s Jason Langridge to demo miniMIXA today. This was at the Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 Press Launch at Weber Shandwick’s offices in London.
From what I saw, Windows Mobile 6 looks absolutely fantastic for connectivity, email, look-and-feel, ease of use and so many other things. Jason also gave some excellent demos of a range of software applications, including Deepfish, and a superb business card scanner (Worldcard Mobile from http://www.penpowerinc.com/. The easy way you can filter and use email, get maps and information to local amenities, greatly improved improved outlook calendar and the new Windows Mobile Device Center (the replacement for Active Sync) etc seemed brilliant. I must admit, on the basis of what I saw today, I am looking forward to buying my own WM6 device!
When it came time to demo miniMIXA on WM6, I did it on an HTC Hermes device. This has a 300MHZ processor with VGA screen. I also briefly showed miniMIXA on an older WM5 HTC TyTN device, and explained that the exact same demo/performance I gave on the touch screen device was just as easy to give on the smartphone with keypad.
You can hear a mono recording of the actual demo/talk I gave HERE
The recording features my commentary throughout the demo. The demo mainly covered the MusicDJ mode, but I also gave a quick showing of the simpler RingtoneDJ mode. To go through all of the capabilities would have taken hours, rather than 10 minutes, so I concentrated on showing a live performance! The audio recording of the demo was made on my Micro BR.
There is a video clip of a screen capture of a similar miniMIXA performance now on YouTube, recorded at 22Khz stereo. This is a mix created with the more advanced MusicDJ mode, which is being used by the Slough Young People’s Center.
The video on YouTube also doubles as a quick tutorial on using miniMIXA++ and MusicDJ mode, as it is annotated to show how to do various things.
The audio output created from this mix was recorded to my Micro BR from the headphone output of the PDA, and the screen capture of the video was recorded on my laptop. I used Microsoft Movie Maker 2 to pull the two together. You can see the video clip below or link to it is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBP97NwG4nU.
Jason Langridge (Mr Mobile) of Microsoft UK runs a highly read blog. He has just said that miniMIXA is one of the coolest/greatest Windows Mobile applications that exist. Seems other readers of his blog also agree. Check out his blog entry here!!
