5 Things you need to know about Windows 7 Phone
Since the moment Microsoft announced and demonstrated a working phone that was using Windows 7 Phone as its OS, people started to ask what the new operating system’s full capabilities are. Business users were more interested in the backwards compatibility with existing 6.5 apps, and Microsoft said that they will not be compatible, so they were pretty disappointed.
Developers, however, wanted to know how the OS “operates” and what new features are available inside. They were asking their questions to find out just how far could they go with their own applications for the OS, and what advantages, disadvantages, possibilities and limitations it had.
Below is some of the most interesting information taken from the answers given by Microsoft reps to all of the public’s questions.
Windows 7 Phone supports multi-tasking. The kernel of this OS does support for multi-tasking, albeit in a very restricted mode, and is available only for the operating system itself and its internal apps. Developers and their own apps will not have access to multi-tasking in the first version of Windows 7 Phone. The Microsoft rep said that it was a really hard decision, but it was ultimately necessary because of limited processing power, memory and battery life on today’s smart phones. The rep also stated that user experience is the most important thing, and if developers had access to the multi-tasking feature, it would lead to slower phones and shorter battery lives (this actually might tell us that Windows 7 Phone itself uses a lot of resources, because all the phones running on Android work pretty well with multi-tasking applications and have good battery life regardless of them). The rep went on to say that the following release of the Windows Phone OS will most probably give developers access to the multi-tasking feature, so their apps could take advantage of it.
Silverlight is the base. Brian Goldfarb, a Microsoft user experience platform manager said: “With this, more than half a million developers for Silverlight became Windows 7 Phone developers as well”. He was talking about the Windows 7 Phone tools for developers that include Silverlight for applications, XNA Game Studio for all the games and Expression Blend 4 beta for visual design (plus Visual Studio 2010 added into the mix). Microsoft reps said that the compatibility of the apps between their mobile, web and desktop platforms coupled with the possibility of millions developers to quickly start creating Windows 7 Phone applications will increase their number very quickly, so that they can catch up to their competitors (iPhone, Android and even WebOS) marketplaces and number of apps. This is great as there are tens of thousands of applications already available for iPhone and Android, and none for Windows 7 Phone.
No native apps are allowed. None of the applications developed by software companies other than Microsoft will be able to communicate straight with the phone’s hardware and integrate closely with the operating system itself. They will be instead made to run on one of the two run times: XNA Game Studio for games and 3D apps and Silverlight for all of the other apps. This helps Microsoft ensure that the user experience (which is their top priority) of Windows 7 Phone won’t be affected by bugs and bad code in third party applications. This has been quite a big problem with Pocket PC and later Windows Mobile, where incompatible or badly written applications were able to lock up, crash and reset the whole OS and device. Microsoft also created a unified hardware specification for all of the phones that run Windows 7 Phone, so the chance of having your phone slow down or crash due to the bad apps you just installed is lower than on any other mobile OS, excluding Apple’s iPhone, which has implemented a similar method.
Advanced integration with the cloud. A lot of companies, including Microsoft, Google and Apple, want to connect all of their device and apps into one “cloud” or “Internet of things”. With the release of Windows 7 Phone, Microsoft is one step closer to this goal and probably ahead of the competitors (but only by a small margin). Windows 7 Phone works without problems with Microsoft’s other services, including Xbox Live, Bing, Windows Phone marketplace, Azure, media streaming and others.
Completely new Apps Marketplace. If you didn’t know there was a Windows Mobile apps marketplace, you didn’t miss a lot. It was terrible and useless, with the only good thing being that it gathered all of the Windows Mobile developers and apps into one place. The Windows Phone 7 Marketplace is new, completely redesigned to be THE place where W7P users search, try and buy their apps. They can get any application, from a Word editor to any game, and keep it updated, just like the iPhone’s and Android’s marketplaces. It will get its own payment processing system and app submission guidelines (each application will be checked and confirmed to work without any issues before being published on the marketplace) – things that will ensure a high quality for all apps.
There’s a lot more for the Windows 7 Phone, and this is just the beginning. Of course, there are some annoying limitations, but there are also a lot of new possibilities and advantages that allow developers to create completely new and unique apps for the platform. All we can do now is wait for the first Windows 7 Phone device to start selling and test them for ourselves.
