Windows Phone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

Engadget is reporting from Mix10 and has taken some shots of a new Netflix app for Windows Phone 7 Series. It is just a prototype and may or may not be released in its current form. What separates it from other Netflix mobile apps is this one isn't just about managing your queue. You can instantly watch the same movies that could be streamed to your TiVo or X-Box. As Engadget says, this shows the power of Silverlight on the platform.

There is also a short 2-3 minute video of the presentation demoing what it would be like to watch a movie on your phone from Netflix.

MIX10 is on now in Las Vegas and while I'm not there personally (unfortunately I'm in dreary Manhattan this morning) I do have some great tidbits from Scott Guthrie & Joe Belfiore. Here's the lowdown:

• The Mobile device application story is this: Silverlight for Internet-based applications, and XNA for gaming.
• Free developer tools: Expression Blend, and Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone.
• Windows Phone Marketplace is getting one-time credit card transactions, mobile-operator based billing, and advertising-funded applications!
• Silverlight 4 Release Candidate and Expression Blend beta 4 are on their way!

And if that's not enough, you can keep up on all of the action at MIX here!

"One final note at today's event is that Microsoft has now officially confirmed for the first time that 7 represents a clean break from Windows Mobile as we know it today; existing apps won't be compatible. Though that's likely to be a pain for existing owners with specialized apps who are looking to stay in the Microsoft ecosystem, Windows Phone 7 Series itself is a very different beast than the operating system it replaces -- it feels different, seeks a different demographic, and symbolically represents a very important clean-slate departure for a company that had lost its way in the mobile space. The bright side for the 6.5 faithful, we suppose, is that Kindel closes by saying that they "will continue to work with our partners to deliver new devices based on Windows Mobile 6.5 and will support those products for many years to come" -- a message Microsoft has been echoing recently."

In case you hadn't heard deduced this, our favorite third party apps won't work with Windows Phone 7 out of the box. Will this mean that developers will flock to technologies such as XNA and Silverlight to re-design their apps? Or do you think they may just leave the platform?

"Different is often good. Especially when it's different for good reasons. Windows Phone 7 Series is different because we reset everything we were doing to focus on end user experience. This extends directly to the developer platform. Developers, designers, and producers of applications, games, and content these days are demanding that we be different as well. Over the last year we've had face to face conversations with 100s of developers all over the world about what we should do with Windows Phone 7 Series."

I think the above screen shot is fantastic, because it shows exactly how different Windows phone 7 really is - there's a strong sense of sameness as you move from left to right, but when you hit the Windows phone 7 user interface, you have to stop and take note that it's completely different from the others. Microsoft is taking a big risk by breaking away from the pack of normalcy every other mobile phone OS brings to the table. Read more...

"Wouldn't it be super cool if the Silverlight apps you built for the desktop could run on Millions of Mobile Devices? If you have been building Silverlight applications and are wondering how to extend them to mobile devices, then this webcast is the one to watch. In this webcast you will not only learn how to extend your existing Silverlight 2 applications to work on Windows Mobile, but also learn how to build rich mobile Silverlight apps that play media, handle simple gestures, have cool animations, and enable web services."

Public availability of Silverlight for Mobile isn't expected until early next year, but if you want a head-start on extending your existing Silverlight apps to mobile devices, then this PDC session is worth a look. And, if you want more, Amit Chopra offers an overview of each of the demos.

"Although we briefly mentioned Silverlight for Windows Mobile a couple days ago, we added the fact that it would be arriving this Spring (specifically, “Q2”). Want more proof? Check out these Demo videos of Silverlight's UI abilities. They're pretty low-rent looking, but what's engaging is that it appears that Silverlight developers will be able to take advantage of them without much complex coding."


Video: Silverlight Mobile Demo - MIX

This is not the greatest demo in the world, but it is nice to see that the Silverlight platform is starting to mature into something that is usable, especially on the mobile front. Now if only Microsoft would stop teasing us with news and video demos and give us the actual software to play with. I for one am excited by the notion of creating fancy rich media applications!