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19 Jul 2010
Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform has moved a step closer to availability with the announcement that the code has reached the Technical Preview stage.
Terry Myerson, corporate vice president of Windows Phone Engineering, said in a posting on the Windows Phone blog that the team has now signed off the code and is preparing to receive hands-on feedback from a broad set of testers around the world.
The Technical Preview milestone means that the platform is largely complete, and that Microsoft has reached the stage of ironing out the bugs and getting feedback from early adopter customers, developers, handset makers and mobile operator partners.
According to Myerson, thousands of prototype phones from vendors such as Asus, LG and Samsung will be making their way into the hands of developers over the next few weeks.
"Combine that with the beta release of the Windows Phone developer tools, and I can't wait to see how our developer partners take advantage of our new approach to smart design and integrated mobile experiences," he said.
Windows Phone 7 is expected to appear in handsets before the end of this year, and is a radical overhaul of Microsoft's mobile strategy in the face of competition from Apple's iPhone and smartphones running Google's Android software.
The company has already been praised on the one hand for its focus on user experience in the new platform, but also criticised because Windows Phone 7 breaks application compatibility with Microsoft's earlier handset releases.
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Ex WM Developer
I ran a products business based on Windows Mobile from about 2002 up until last year. Last year I was working as a consultant in a large (very well known) mobile operator and MSFT gave a pre-announcement of their mobile roadmap. As soon as I discovered that MSFT were going to drop support for native development (that's code written directly to talk to the operating system - as in all Windows Mobile applications to date) I could see the 8 years of experience I had gained was going to be worthless from that point on. I was very angry that MSFT had done this, they could have left the OS APIs open to the developer and then I would have been able to retain my skillset, but what they are actually doing is forcing everyone to change. Well, I don't want to so I have transitioned over to the Andriod platform, I have no desire or intention to learn Silverlight. Treating WM as a non-consumer device year after year, and therefore missing the opportunity that Apple grabbed was such a bad business error on Steve Balmer's part and will cost countless millions of dollars in wasted development effort and indeed in the time those developers have crafted their skill. The arrogance of this error is just the same as Steve Jobs over the iPhone 4 AntennaGate. For me as a seasoned mobile software developer MSFT is dead.
Posted by: James 19 Jul 2010