Microsoft has confirmed that the current team of 1,000 developers, working on Windows Mobile 7, are planning to feature social networks as a key element of Windows Mobile 7.In a company job posting, spotted by Mobile Tech World, officials are looking for a senior program manager in the Windows Mobile 7 Communications Group:
The Windows Mobile 7 Communications group is building experiences on the phone that present your content - friends, pictures, messages, events - to you in immersive and engaging ways. Our vision is to bring social networks to life by integrating them into the core experience of the phone. For example imagine seeing all the newsfeeds from all the networks you care about in a single hub on the phone. Or imagine the phone instantly telling you what your friend is doing and where he is when you get a call from him.
Paul Spain, who attended Tech-Ed in New Zealand last week, confirmed that Microsoft announced there were currently 1,000 engineers working on Windows Mobile 7. Over at the Microsoft jobs center, there are currently 69 jobs posted concerning Windows Mobile. Clearly Microsoft is ramping up its efforts in the mobile space to provide some healthy competition for devices such as Apple's iPhone and Palm's Pre.
Earlier this month, UX "evangelist" Stephen Chapman unearthed some confirmed features of Windows Mobile 7. In a blog posting, Chapman posted various features ranging from a Windows Live ID feature to MEMS sensor capabilities in Windows Mobile 7, including accelerometer and compass.
According to insiders close to the Windows Mobile 7 project, Microsoft had originally planned to unveil Windows Mobile 7 at the Professional Developers Conference, Los Angeles, in November this year. It's not yet clear if this has been pushed back as the project has run into several delays during its time. Stay tuned for further information as Neowin will be attending PDC 2009.
There is good competition in the Mobile OS market already, BB, Google, Palm, Apple, Nokia. It is just the Microsoft isn't competing, and won't be until 7 comes out.
(snipped)
Microsoft has a decent market share with windows mobile, sure its not the best but it is one of the oldest and with a few tweaks and a custom rom it does a pretty dam good job of competing.
Last edited by GreyWolfSC on 18 Sep 2009 - 12:21
While I expect it will axe support for all previous versions. I hope they will end it with 7 and support its predecessor with each new release.
HTC does some really nice work making Windows Mobile just as functional as anything else. And it's had multi-tasking for years, so the Pre's big feature over the iPhone isn't exactly unique.
I like the OS, but it is definitely for business and enterprise users. If you really want tons of games, etc, then just get an iPhone and be done with it. Otherwise I'll take an HTC WinMo device any day over the competition.
The other WinMo manufacturers, I don't want to touch since I think everything is left default.
If MS pulls everything together like they can and should do then they can be a large challenger in many markets.
If MS pulls everything together like they can and should do then they can be a large challenger in many markets.
Good. Microsoft seems to be a company that tries lots of things and keeps what works. It has the dual effect of making things seem fragmented at times while still producing great products.
Yes, while also producing a lot of crap as well. Microsoft is not focused, they tend to stray into a lot of areas, and since they have loads of cash, they just throw it at anything they think can have a return. Cash has actually been a bad thing for Microsoft IMHO. Apple have loads of cash as well, but seem a lot more focused. They also have good and bad products (apple tv), but they are still in focused.
Exactly. The problem with Apple is that they focus so much on form factor and hitting a certain profitable segment of the market that they don't make many products that appeal to me. Microsoft takes a lot of chances and throws a lot into R&D. Only some of the things developed end up used in a retail product but it leads to some pretty solid software that runs on just about anything and (in my opinion) offers the best of three worlds as far as deskop/notebook software goes. You get the support and development of a commercial OS like OSX but you aren't told what brand of hardware you can run it on a-la Linux.
Spending cash to develop something that doesn't pan out does zero to hurt the consumer but it helps immensely when it leads to useful new technologies.
The longhorn project had a lot very good things come out of it programmatically -- the main issues were in marketing and project management so you should probably move your trolling to a topic you're educated on.
Particular things of note, since you'll probably argue in a completely uninformed way:
Windows Explorer re-written to .NET (and the rest of .NET/WinFX),
Graphics installer (& accompanying imaged based distribution for the enterprise),
TPM support,
Any number of kernel libraries rewritten with 64bit awareness,
UAC (which despite your obvious distaste for it is programmatically a good step forward),
and that pretty much excludes any of the low level kernel changes that were driven by Server 2008, which was also developed under project Longhorn. Despite the consumerist distaste for the result (Vista) Longhorn represented a good period of development for the NT kernel line. It is not uncommon to have 2000+ individual developers working on an operating system... and despite being mobile, WinMo 7 is still an operating system with many of the traditional challenges and some new ones.
I don't think it's a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth here.
I agree with your point overall but this isn't true - even in Windows 7 there's almost no managed code and all of the API's are WIN32 or COM (to use them from .NET they're all wrapped).
I was under the opposite impression but I haven't spent a lot of time with the Windows 7 code pack or Vista for that matter so I'll stand down from this point if that's the case.
I was under the impression much of the original interfaces and libraries have been re-written to use much more .NET through frameworks like WPF and WCF and a whole lot less COM/GDI and Win32 (though they can co-exist). I'm happy to be corrected though.
I was under the impression much of the original interfaces and libraries have been re-written to use much more .NET through frameworks like WPF and WCF and a whole lot less COM/GDI and Win32 (though they can co-exist). I'm happy to be corrected though.
Well it makes sense if you think about it - the big push on 7 is speed after all and moving everything into managed code isn't a great idea in that respect for the OS itself. An example - the new superbar's interface is exposed as ITaskbar3 which is a COM interface - to use it from c# MS are pushing the "Windows API Codepack" which wraps this (and other new) interface(s) exposed in Windows 7. Moreover MS are pushing DirectX as the new platform for UI development - it's what the desktop window manager uses, it's what WPF uses, it's what direct2d uses - which is completely unmanaged code (part history and part 'cos it makes sense when you're writing highly performant code that controls hardware). It also makes sense when you see how slow WPF actually is - there are certain things it's just too slow for (displaying 3d models for example) compared to full-fat-directx.
None of this is bad though - and none of it reflects badly on your original assertion; I couldn't agree more that the major architectural upheaval of Vista set the scene for 7 and that for a project as large as the Windows operating system (and it's requirement to cover ALL users on ALL hardware with ALL the software that comes with it) it is ALWAYS large scale development.
I was under the impression much of the original interfaces and libraries have been re-written to use much more .NET through frameworks like WPF and WCF and a whole lot less COM/GDI and Win32 (though they can co-exist). I'm happy to be corrected though.
Well it makes sense if you think about it - the big push on 7 is speed after all and moving everything into managed code isn't a great idea in that respect for the OS itself. An example - the new superbar's interface is exposed as ITaskbar3 which is a COM interface - to use it from c# MS are pushing the "Windows API Codepack" which wraps this (and other new) interface(s) exposed in Windows 7. Moreover MS are pushing DirectX as the new platform for UI development - it's what the desktop window manager uses, it's what WPF uses, it's what direct2d uses - which is completely unmanaged code (part history and part 'cos it makes sense when you're writing highly performant code that controls hardware). It also makes sense when you see how slow WPF actually is - there are certain things it's just too slow for (displaying 3d models for example) compared to full-fat-directx.
None of this is bad though - and none of it reflects badly on your original assertion; I couldn't agree more that the major architectural upheaval of Vista set the scene for 7 and that for a project as large as the Windows operating system (and it's requirement to cover ALL users on ALL hardware with ALL the software that comes with it) it is ALWAYS large scale development.
Yeah that makes a lot of sense, I haven't had much of a chance to go over the new API documentation for W7 yet that's why I was curious -- thanks for the clarification.
I was under the impression much of the original interfaces and libraries have been re-written to use much more .NET through frameworks like WPF and WCF and a whole lot less COM/GDI and Win32 (though they can co-exist). I'm happy to be corrected though.
Well it makes sense if you think about it - the big push on 7 is speed after all and moving everything into managed code isn't a great idea in that respect for the OS itself. An example - the new superbar's interface is exposed as ITaskbar3 which is a COM interface - to use it from c# MS are pushing the "Windows API Codepack" which wraps this (and other new) interface(s) exposed in Windows 7. Moreover MS are pushing DirectX as the new platform for UI development - it's what the desktop window manager uses, it's what WPF uses, it's what direct2d uses - which is completely unmanaged code (part history and part 'cos it makes sense when you're writing highly performant code that controls hardware). It also makes sense when you see how slow WPF actually is - there are certain things it's just too slow for (displaying 3d models for example) compared to full-fat-directx.
None of this is bad though - and none of it reflects badly on your original assertion; I couldn't agree more that the major architectural upheaval of Vista set the scene for 7 and that for a project as large as the Windows operating system (and it's requirement to cover ALL users on ALL hardware with ALL the software that comes with it) it is ALWAYS large scale development.
Yeah that makes a lot of sense, I haven't had much of a chance to go over the new API documentation for W7 yet that's why I was curious -- thanks for the clarification.
You're most welcome
The location-based services especially sound cool. You can see an implementation of this in Microsoft's 2019 vision series, and that looks great... but it'll probably only work between Windows Mobile phones.
At this stage Windows Mobile 7 looks a lot like Vista – grandly ambitious but very late, and likely to be very bloated.
Though I am liking the direction 6.5.1 is going, I honestly don't think WM7 will have the time to be developed to compete. It's going to take at least another year to be finished and by that time, who knows what everyone else will have. MS is toooooooo late to the game on this one.
It seems they got the software for Zune right though, lets see what winmo 7 has to offer.
Thats exactly what I was thinking. I mean...this is an OS for a mobile phone, not a friggen fighter jet.
+1
1000????????????!
1000????????????!
Glad I'm not the only one thinking 1,000 devs is way way way too much for Mobile OS.
1000????????????!
Glad I'm not the only one thinking 1,000 devs is way way way too much for Mobile OS.
I think they tend to put too many people on the majority of projects anyway. Too many cooks in the kitchen as it were.
I was thinking the same thing. I'm failing to see what they could possibly use 1000 developers for on a new version of Windows Mobile... Sounds like they have some really big plans for Windows Mobile 7... I can't wait to see what they've got planned... When do we get to see something?
Well, they wouldn't have 1000 working on the OS, they could have most of them working on applications, design, etc...
It still has a kernel and all your traditional operating system components with a few layers of multi-touch and the battery concerns etc.
the crack you smoke seems to get more and more potent everyday...what do you do..age it in your basement where you live?
winmo is derived from windows...just like the iphone os is based of mac os x.
You cannot combine window 7 and windows mobile 7...common sense should tell you why
winmo is derived from windows...just like the iphone os is based of mac os x.
You cannot combine window 7 and windows mobile 7...common sense should tell you why
Yes, I realize this, I guess I was too subtle for you. i was making fun of a comment that Steve made toward Google, who have to OS, android and the upcoming PC OS. I will try to make myself more obvious in the future. You know you can read the stuff in between the brackets.
winmo is derived from windows...just like the iphone os is based of mac os x.
You cannot combine window 7 and windows mobile 7...common sense should tell you why
Yes, I realize this, I guess I was too subtle for you. i was making fun of a comment that Steve made toward Google, who have to OS, android and the upcoming PC OS. I will try to make myself more obvious in the future. You know you can read the stuff in between the brackets.
"Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google."
Don't see anything different in that and windows.
Windows mobile was designed to work on phones, and windows was designed for laptops and windows. And they both have areas which overlap.
www.xda-developers.com
been on there for ages
been on there for ages
..in unfinished form yes. I'm waiting for a final build for my TD2 since they've added some more features in the past couple of months that makes it a bit friendlier.
been on there for ages
..in unfinished form yes. I'm waiting for a final build for my TD2 since they've added some more features in the past couple of months that makes it a bit friendlier.
Windows Mobile doesn't seem to have a "final" build lately. It is always changing. They "finished" 6.5 but have instantly gone on to 6.5.1 where the UI is being changed. The one I currently have on my phone (6.5) I believe was "unfinished" but is 100% stable, more so than any 6.1 ROM I used before. I have gone nearly 6 days without even dropping my data session! More without rebooting! I could never do this on 6.1
Long time coming...
I can see why you want to move onto another mobile OS, but I think 6.5 is fine to use.
i'll be selling my iphone by the end of the year to get a android device.
i'll be selling my iphone by the end of the year to get a android device.
technically the UI isn't google's. HTC designed it and it's loosely based of the touchflo from HTC winmo devices.
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