Attended the windows phone jump start event yesterday and had a chance to see some presentations and play with the new windows phone.
The Good:
- Xbox Live is integrated into the phone http://www.xbox.com/en-US/Live/Mobile/Home
- Free MS Office 2010 on the phone
- Zune is integrated
- GPS/Accelerometer/Camera (nothing new there)
- All developer tools are free http://create.msdn.com/en-us/home/getting_started (comes with VS2010, Blend, XNA Studio and deployment tools)
- .NET developers can write apps in C# & Silverlight using VS2010 and the free tools
- Free XNA Studio for Game developers
- No multi tasking support but the Notifications API lets you send notifications to the phone from an external server and an application close event allows developers to save the applications state before exit
- Launchers framework allows for fire and forget actions (like sending an SMS)
- Choosers Framework lets you choose some piece of information (like a contact, photo or song) and drive it back to the application
- Trial API available to offer trial of applications/games
- Ad API available for Ad integration
- $100/Year membership allows you to unlock 3 phones for testing apps, 5 free application submissions and unlimited paid app submissions
- 30%-70% profit split between Microsoft and Developers for paid apps
Not so Good:
- No copy/paste (might be in the next release)
- The onboard Sql CE Server is closed to app developers for now (have to use isolated storage)
- Bluetooth support is limited to headphones
- Looks like you need a Win 7 / 2008 box to install the dev tools
- No CDMA support yet (it's coming next year)
Links:
http://create.msdn.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/davedev/
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/default.aspx
http://silverlight.codeplex.com/
http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/egibson/windows-phone-7-jump-start-session-1-of-12-introduction