AT&T used its Las Vegas developer summit last week to launch a new mobile application software development diagnostic tool. While every "me too" mobile diagnostics tool in the pile pushes "optimization functionality" as its key purpose, the company's latest offering aims to be comprehensive if nothing else with options to tune performance, speed, network impact, and even battery use.

The new offering works as a two-part tool. A data collector sits beside a data analyzer to evaluate mobile applications and optimize them before final release to assess their network impact and battery use. AT&T appears to be showing its practical and pragmatic side with other battery-power focused optimization technologies in this space, including an Application Resource Optimizer (ARO) for Android.

AT&T says it is working with Keynote DeviceAnywhere in offering this tool to developers. The company is also using its developer portal to present AT&T API Platform SDKs alongside SDKs for platforms/technologies including Android, Brew MP, HTML5, RIM BlackBerry, and Windows Phone.

According to notes on the AT&T developer portal, "If you are working with the AT&T API Platform, you'll want to leverage the SDK for Sencha Touch, the AT&T API Platform SDK for Microsoft, or the AT&T API Platform SDK for HTML5 to help bring your Ruby, PHP, Java, C#, and Visual Basic applications to market. Working code samples are included with these SDKs."

For all of its big brand showboating, AT&T appears to be quietly modest on the subject of the PDF-based developer learning resources on its programmer pages. The company's Go To Market section features tips on how to get your app noticed; the Advanced Software Development section covers topics including "HTML5: What Works, How to Use It and Where Do I Find All That?"; the API and Tools section covers privacy and hands-on API advice; and the enterprise section covers "Building Machine-To-Machine (M2M) Applications" as well as "Key Trends and Top Practices for Developers".