What I did see was impressive. Microsoft is definitely catching up to Palm in usability, but it still has a ways to go. Merlin has some useful features for prior Palm users, such as Block Recognizer, which is essentially Graffiti for the Pocket PC, and the ability to beam single addresses and appointments to and from Palm-based devices. Other appealing features are built-in VPN and a Terminal Services Client. The Merlin is aimed squarely at business users, but does have some interesting consumer features such as skinning and a MSN client.

Over the course of two days, myself and other influentials in the handheld industry received a tour of the Merlin and a few goodies in addition to the iPAQ. We also heard from various Microsoft people, some consultant who tried to express the importance of revenue sharing but came off as someone who loves ring tones, and Clay Shirky, who had some very interesting points regarding peer-to-peer (P2P) applications. I won't go into details here, but you can find some great information at his website about the importance of P2P and the failure of closed architectures such as WAP. His was the most insightful presentation of the conference, and I was surprised to see him, given his articles on Hailstorm and Slashdot.