The topic mobile is on everyone’s lips – indeed throughput the year! The MobileTech Conference is therefore the biannual venue for captivated visitors. Following the successful spring edition in Munich, preparations are now in full swing for its autumn counterpart.
Andreas Hölzl was a speaker at the conference and presented concepts in his talk “Andriod-UIs für alle(s)” for the efficient realization of user interfaces for all conceivable Android-smartphones and tablets. On the conference sidelines, Claudia Fröhling invited the mobile expert for an interview and chatted with him about mobile business apps, Wikihood and tablet UIs. The main message was: due to the expanding bandwidth of mobile end devices, platform-independent mobile development expertise is in demand as never before.

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At the end of last week I received a comment concerning my MobileTech blog posts, which cast doubt on my objectivity: The tone of my posts was almost exclusively positive and contained too little critical analysis of the conference’s content.
Well guys, if the tone was positive it’s simply because it was a great conference; both from my perspective and from the perspective of the many other participants that I spoke to.
So what makes for a great conference? Most importantly, of course, is that you come away feeling that you’ve learned useful stuff. And I learned a lot. For example:

• I got a great introduction to the Android platform from the chaps at Open Knowledge.
• I got an extraordinary sense that we’ve only just begun to see the potential of mobile technology. Case in point: Mind-blowing demos from Reality Jockey and Wahwah.fm, Andy Abgottspon and others.
• The fact that UI design is even more critical in mobile than in traditional apps was made crystal clear to me. The necessary clues as to how to create successful UI designs were provided by Werner Jainek (design process) and Stephan Gillmeier (iOS APIs Core Animation, Core Graphics, Quarz Core)
• Finally, Heiko Behrens reminded me of the growing power (and relative simplicity) of web technology and that it’s possible to exploit this power in the context of native apps. This is certainly something I’m going to pay more attention to in my future mobile project.

With all the new information and valuable reminders, there was naturally a lot of brainstorming and networking going on at MobileTech 2012. Facilitating this were the more general aspects of the conference – accommodation, catering etc. – which were as smooth as silk in their execution. Kudos to Sebastian Meyen of Sands Media and his team as well as Holiday Inn München.

So to return to the comment above: I stand firmly by my statement that this was a conference of exceptional quality. If anyone has a different take on it, please feel free to comment.