I am back from my week in Orlando and I must say I had a great time. I was lucky enough to win a conference pass and 3 nights hotel stay at the Marriott World Center from berryreview.com .
I arrived Monday afternoon in Orlando and took the shuttle to the resort (it's not a hotel but a full resort). They had already setup the conference center in preparation for the week and were having a few pre-event events. I walked around and got to meet a few attendees and a few vendors. It was a great way to start the week off.
On Tuesday was the keynote speech by CEO Thorsten Heins to kick off the conference. He came out with energy and a great speech. He showed off a few features of the new BB10 handset from the Dev Alpha Device which was given to all the developers at the conference. The top feature that I thought was amazing was the ability of the camera. It takes a photo in a type of time lapse which you can then zoom in on an area of the picture and move forward or backward to get the perfect shot. I can think of several ways this could become a very useful tool for someone who is always taking pictures with my phone instead of bringing a camera with me. One of the other features they showed off was the touch screen keyboard. I am not a huge fan of these virtual keyboards but the one they put on this device was kind of cool with the ability to swipe up as you type to put full words into what your working on.
After Thorsten was done they brought on several app developers showing off items that they have already created for the BB10 after only having the Dev Alpha for a week. RIM is really pushing and focusing on getting the developers to have apps ready for when the BB10 is released, which I think is very smart as that is one of the biggest complaints people have about RIM devices. They also showed a few new apps that were coming out for the PlayBook which they are also really pushing development for.
Once the keynote was done the breakout sessions started, all week I focused on going to sessions to do with BDS, UDS and Mobile Fusion, which are the replacements to BES servers. BDS will be used to control BB10 phones and PlayBooks. UDS is the way for companies to put security and controls on iPhones, Androids and any tablets that users might want connected to the enterprise. To make managing everything as easy as possible RIM has created Mobile Fusion, which is the front window to all RIM services. You can go into Mobile Fusion and it will connect to your current BES, BDS and UDS servers so that you can manage all devices from the one screen. After getting some theoretical knowledge I was also able to go to the hands on lab and install a server and play around with it. Very slick and very well done by RIM. The server itself is free and then you buy the CAL's for every device you want to connect. Makes it affordable and easy to use.
Tuesday night we were all bussed to Universal Studio's where they had a section of it closed off for the BlackBerry World party. There was food and alcohol all over the area and DJ's playing music on the main stage. One of the DJ's was using a PlayBook connected to the sound system and running the beta version of PaceMaker to show off what you are able to do with a PlayBook. It was a fun night with lots to do and to hang out with people outside of the conference.
The rest of the week flew by with breakout sessions and time spent in the Solutions Hall talking to vendors. They had two car's in the solution hall, both run by PlayBooks. One was a police car from Chatham that had a PlayBook on the dash instead of a computer and was wired in to control everything in the car. The second was a Porsche concept car that had three PlayBooks in it. One was the center console and then they had two in the back seats. All were interconnected and could be streaming different items. It was very cool to see how powerful these devices are and what you could do with them.
I flew home on Friday which gave me an extra day to relax a bit, I woke up to see the palm trees and a warm sunny day. Saturday morning I woke in Calgary to a snow storm, I should have stayed a couple more days in Orlando.
All in all it was a great week, I got to see some cool things and I learned some new things. It also showed me that RIM is far from being obsolete or dead, they are being innovative and with over 100 different countries represented at BBWorld 2012 they have a true world wide reach. Now I wait for the new BB10 phones to come out and see what the final product will look like.
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