TamsWMS – the Windows Mobile Smartphone Blog

Microsoft has recently released an emulator of its new operating system. It was intended solely for developers: thus, most of the OS features were blocked out.

However, tweakers quickly found a way to “Unlock” the emulator so that it provides access to the entire operating system. This means that one can now play around with all applications which make up the OS.

The 9 minute video below gives you a nice walk-through:
http://www.viddler.com/explore/engadget/videos/1231/

The arrival of Windows Mobile 7 has essentially ended all future development for the form factor known as WMS – the touchscreen-less Windows Mobile-based smartphone.

It traditionally was more popular in the USA than it was in Europe. However, the French carrier SFR now takes a final stab by releasing an “MSN Messenger phone” with an unknown version of Windows Mobile:

Further information can be had via the French web site below:
http://messengersurvotremobile.com/messengeredition251bysfr/

When Windows Mobile 7 was first announced, most of us scratched their head and wondered. By now, I guess that quite a few of you have freaked out – if not, find out more below:

No cut&paste
The first idiocy comes from “focus group research”. Microsoft claims to have figured out that users never use Copy&Paste – and has thus omitted it from the (P)OS.

No real multitasking – J2ME model only
The next embarrassing fact is that Microsoft seems focused on resurrecting the J2ME multitasking model used on old featurephones. It essentially means that one app runs, while all others are halted.

Engadget furthermore got the state machine below:

Marketplace has kill switch
Finally, a rather obvious thing – the Marketplace has a remote kill switch.

When it comes to mobile devices, analysts usually look just at the processor. However, the CPU alone does not make a device – it also takes the baseband processor which handles communication.

Strategy Analytics performed a tally of baseband makers, and ended up with the following chart – it shows who produced how much in Q3 2009:

Source: Strategy Analytics

Traditionally, integrated development environments were file oriented – if you edited code, you edited it on a file-by-file basis.

Code Bubbles is an experimental Java IDE which goes a different way. In it, functions are the elemental parts of an application: you edit code on a per-function level, and can open calling and called functions easily.

A video showing the concept is below – set it to a lower resolution on a slower machine:

We’ve seen quite a few leaks showing Windows Mobile 7 before the official introduction at the Mobile World Congress this year – most of them looked like the ones in the slide below:

Engadget reports the following about them:

…Microsoft’s Albert Shum — one of WP7S’ chief designers who we had the pleasure of meeting back at MWC — just confirmed the accuracy of those leaks in a session here at MIX10. Discussing the reboot of the WinMo 7 program that happened inside Microsoft about a year ago …

So: who of you prefers the design above? I sure as hell do…

Microsoft has just opened its official developer program for Windows Mobile 7. Developers who hit this link can sign up…

Unfortunately, various limitations of the platform were disclosed at the same time. The bullet-point list of horror contains further information:

• No user-exchangeable memory (aka no MicroSD cards)
• No real multitasking
• No way to install apps except for the marketplace
• Ultra-strict hardware guidelines: if you have 5 buttons, no WM7 for you

Not much to add here…

Microsoft’s latest announcement (at the MIX) should give all mobile computing pundits a nice bit of food for thought – they stated that their new operating system was developed for “Life Maximisers”.

Engadget captured the two slides below, which explain the concept further:

Cutting a long story short: businessmen and power users are no longer interesting. Of course, this makes sense – for most of us, sticking to our smartphones for an extra year would not be a real issue (read: we are difficult to sell to).

Life Maximisers, on the other hand, usually don’t have smartphones yet – and don’t really care about good keyboards either…

The US smartphone market is especially interesting for mobile developers, as it has traditionally been extremely strong when it comes to moving content. The US-based company comScore has just released a bit of data on the matter.

First of all, a look at the vendors on an OEM level – this figure includes both dumbphones and smartphones alike:

Another classic metric is the one showing the platforms – here is ComScore’s take on this matter:

Further information can be had via the URL below:
http://www.comscore.com/index.php/layout/set/ …

One year ago, LG could best be described as “enthusiastically WM” – their CEO announced intentions that most of their future smartphones would be based on Windows Mobile – and not the then-up-and-coming Android.

Mobile Business Briefing now reports the following:

LG, the world’s third-largest handset vendor, yesterday launched a smartphone based on Google’s Android operating system in South Korea, its home market. The model LG-KH5200, which will be sold by the country’s second-largest mobile operator KT, will compete against Motorola’s Android-based smartphone MOTOROI launched earlier this year through top carrier SK Telecom. LG plans to boost its smartphone offerings with some 20 models this year, half of which will be based on Android.

Is it just me, or isn’t Microsoft’s game plan as great as they thought it was? Hmm…

The demo units used by Microsoft employees to show off Windows Phone 7 all had a 800×480 screen – which can be considered the current pinnacle of high-definition screens for mobile devices. However, these screens also are expensive…

Shawn Hargreaves now disclosed further information which should be interesting to both users and developers:

The phone features an image scaler which allows games to render to any size backbuffer they like, and have it automatically stretched to fill the display, with black bars along the edges if the backbuffer and display have different aspect ratios (an idea that will be familiar to Xbox developers). This scaling is handled by dedicated hardware, so does not consume any GPU resources, and it uses a high quality image filter that gives much better results than bilinear filtering like you would get if you did this yourself on the GPU. The scaler is important for two reasons:

* At launch, all phones will have a 480×800 (WVGA) display resolution, but we will add 320×480 (HVGA) in a future update. Of course you can detect the native resolution and program your game to adapt to this if you want, but the scaler allows games to pick just one resolution, always render at that fixed size, and still run correctly on phones with different native screen sizes. For bonus points, we automatically scale touch input to match your chosen resolution.

* 480×800 is a lot of pixels! This is a great resolution for displaying text, browsing the web, etc, but it can be a challenge for intensive 3D games to render so much data at a good framerate. To boost performance, some games may prefer to render at a lower resolution, then scale up to fill the display.

Not much to add here…

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 announcement split the tech world into two parts: one half went bonkers, and the other half was stunned. Yours truly remains a skeptic – expecially when reading interview replies like the one below.

JoyStiq asked a Microsoft employee whether games for Windows Phone 7 would be able to benefit from specific hardware features of individual phones. The answer was:

What you’ll see is that we really want to drive consistency. What we’re doing is trying to make sure people try and focus on what’s guaranteed to be there. We certainly want to see an ecosystem where someone can say “hey, that’s a really cool game, I’d really like to get that,” and no matter what type of Windows Phone 7 Series device I have, I can have that same experience. That’s a very core value.

For me, this is a very bad sign – it means that the Windows Mobile ecosystem as we know it is all but dead. From now on, its specific hardware features only – device diversity is dead…

When set up against the job of making an ad for a motor saw manufacturer, most of us will probably think of lightly-clad girls, muscular men and the jungle.

According to DirectDaily, the folks at the chainsaw manufacturer STIHL went a different way. They created a self-updating paper calendar, which is pictured below:

Not much to add here…

Microsoft’s approach to software development is pretty unique – more than one book has been written on the topic.

Technologizer now spoke with the project manager behind the original version of Windows:

…

At that point Windows was no longer considered the company’s star project, as it had become a bit of an embarrassment. Even internally there were doubts among some in the company that Windows would ever ship. Also, because Ballmer had already burned though four product managers to try to get there–people who now had been either reassigned or were no longer at Microsoft–the product was developing a reputation for career death.

…

Further information can be had at the URL below:
http://technologizer.com/2010/03/08/the-secret-origin-of-windows/