Monday, September 13, 2010

Micorosft Windows Phone 7 date appears set for announcement

I'm interested in seeing Windows Phone 7 in action and it appears the launch date for an event in New York is October 11th.

It appears each of the current mobile phone producers want to be the single point of providing apps for their phones. This enables them to get a cut of each app sale. I'm not a fan of this approach as I don't feel I should have to release a product via an app store if I want to provide an app for my clients. Why pay a percentage when really I'm the one generating the business? I'm hoping Microsoft's new phone becomes the developers phone and again gives developers some control over their destiny. I'm not sure this is going to happen.

The issues I've seen so far is Windows Phone 7 lacks copy and paste (a feature I use regularly) and isn't true multi-tasking. It would have been nice if Microsoft enabled Visual Basic developers to develop for Windows Phone 7, as that would have reduced the learning curve for millions of developers and an immediate point of entry into mobile phone development.

If we look at the cost to develop for the iPhone for the average developer, it requires a Mac and for me, a steep learning curve to learn Objective C. Given the average return for a developer of apps for the iPhone, I can see a lot of developers never making a return for their time and effort whilst Apple makes hundreds of millions of dollars. I was hoping Microsoft would have made it easier for developers, but sadly I think that isn't going to be the case and there will be a need to learn Silverlight.

Having said this, whilst the Windows Phone 7 isn't what I would have liked, but that's OK. It will still be good to see what Microsoft has produced and to see how the market responds. To me choice is a good thing and Microsoft will shortly give us another mobile phone operating system to chose from.

Kelvin Eldridge

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