So mix has finally kicked off and today was the day when a lot of the rumours and speculation got either confirmed or denied. I’ve been following the Windows Phone 7 track for the day, which took me to the Keynote and to Joe Belfiore’s session about Windows Phone 7 and Charlie Kindle’s session about the Windows Phone Application Platform.
It’s been pretty high level today but a good primer about why Microsoft have done what they’ve done, tomorrow promises to be much more of a deep dive, lots of good demonstrations and information though.
Keynote
The keynote showed off a lot of the new features that are coming up in Silverlight 4 (e.g. webcam/microphone support. Also multi-monitor support, with the ability to play an HD stream full screen on one monitor whilst leaving the desktop accessible on the others). EBay also annouced the availabiltiy of the OpenEbay platform to allow Silverlight application developers to monitise their applications. All the code used for the Olympics Silverlight player will be opensourced to allow others to deliver similar solutions in the future.
The rest of the keynote was dominated by Windows Phone 7. They confirmed that 3rd party application development will be done in either Silverlight or XNA. The graphics on the device is fully hardware accelerated to allow for a fluid smooth user interface. The dev tools were demonstrated with applications being created in Visual Studio 2010 and also Expression Blend 4. The device emulator was shown which includes some nice features like being able to orient the phone and also supports multi-touch when running on a multi-touch equipped Windows 7 PC.
The developer tools for Windows Phone are free, and “will always be free” and are available to download now from http://developer.windowsphone.com
The keynote also included shiny demos from Netflix, Graphic.ly, Foursquare, Shazam, a Major League Soccer app, Seesmic, and Coding4Fun with a remote control t-shirt firing cannon.
All applications will be loaded onto the phone via the marketplace, free applications are supported, and commercial applications can have a try before you buy mode. The manner of the trial is up to the application developer, an IsInTrial() API call is provided, and if it returns true you can implement whatever restrictions to your application you see fit (e.g. limited functionality or time limits). You can also use another API to send the user back to the marketplace to purchase the full version of your application, although subscriptions or recurring payments will not be supported in the first release of the phone.
Afternoon Sessions
The other sessions also gave some more insight into how to go about working with these devices. There is actually a second route for loading applications onto a device. When you have a real device, you can register the device with the developer portal to have it unlocked, which means you can deploy applications to it direct from Visual Studio and run on the real hardware rather than the emulator. A question was asked about deploying a corporate application, currently there is no way to distribute an app other than uploading it to the marketplace and making it visible, or doing a developer deployment onto each device. The first release of the phone is most certainly consumer oriented.
The operating system is a multitasking OS, some aspects of the phone can execute in the background, like web browser page rendering or music playback for examples, however 3rd party applications will be paused when the user navigates away from them, and it’s possible that the OS may then unload them to recover the memory. The live tiles still change and get updated via push notifications without the need for the application to remain in memory.
The phone uses Zune sync to transfer music/pictures/video on and off the device, there’s no more activesync. It can synchronise over Wifi, and a nice feature is that it will attempt to perform a sync when it is connected to an external power source – so when you get home, you plug it into it’s charger, it’ll check whether your home wifi network is available, and if so upload and pictures you’ve taken that day and download any fresh music from your PC – nice touch.
All the phones are a standard spec, all have capacitive touch screens and will support 4 or more contact points, also A-GPS, accelerometer, compass, light, proximity sensors, 5MP+ camera, 256Mb ram and at least 8GB of flash, DirectX 9, ARM V7 processor, and optional hardware keyboard. The launch display will be 800x480 but a second resolution of 400x320 will be added soon after launch, but there’s no plans for any others.
The marketplace that will be used is the same marketplace as is currently being used by Windows Mobile 6.x, so if you have an account on that service you’re good to go. Application submissions are expected to get started in June.
The major takeaway from today was the Call To Action – Produce Delightful Experiences for Your Users!
More tomorrow!