Gadgetory

I'm enough read with cnet I'm here in Las Vegas at Microsoft's mix conference i'm here with Joe Belfiore who works with Windows Mobile heavily and scott guthrie who works in microsoft's developer division also very involved with silverlight obviously you guys talked about a range of things today but one of the things that people are most interested on is the windows phone 7 series operating system and kind of everything about it when or the device is going to be available and what can I expect on it from that perspective you know most of the attention today was on developers and the fact as we've said before that they're going to use silverline XNA one of the cool demos was Netflix playing on the phone and I'm curious that seemed to be a good example of what can Windows Phone do that other devices in the market can't do and I'm curious if there are other things that you would say what we've unveiled will allow you to do X that you haven't been able to do before on the phone sure I know I'll cover some user doors ah so sort of from a user experience perspective one of the main ideas that we have in Windows Phone 7 series is to try to do a smart design that anticipates what people want and brings together tasks that are similar in to integrate experiences we call hub so for example the netflix app you gave as an example integrates right into our music and video hub and that's something that we don't see other smartphones doing today you have one place to go you go to music and video and whether you're a zune user who sings some music and video a netflix user that's gotta watch instantly queue available a Pandora user a last.fm use or all these applications can integrate right into music and video so you have one stop shopping for whatever service it is you like best another example along those lines that we showed was the colorizer application which lets you modify the pictures that you've taken with a camera on the phone third-party applications can integrate right in and become an extension of the photos hub that's built into windows phone seven spheres so one of the things that we've seen a lot of is this idea that we really want applications not to sort of exists generically in one big applications bucket but kind of what are they doing and where does it make sense on the phone one of the things that users seem to want is their cake and eating it too in terms of being able to have simple experiences you know what do I want to do right now and being able to do a lot of the things can you talk about we're multitasking the ability to do more than one thing at once what's Microsoft approach been to that yeah sure we're we're trying to make the system really smart about doing multitasking for the things that you want to have multi task but also not do it when it shouldn't to keep your battery life as long as possible so for example at the heart of the windows phone seven series devices is a modern version of the c/e operating system kernel that does full multitasking we take advantage of that to do things like loading your browser web pages in the background if you start the browse or start a web page loading and flip back you can wait a little while and go back and your page will be right there we play music in the background we download your email in the background all these sorts of things and we're working with our third-party developer partners to enable ways for third-party applications to also get things done although we also plan to suspend third-party applications if you're not using them to conserve your battery so one of the things that seems like Microsoft is doing is saying just because we can do something doesn't mean we're going to do it all the time which sounds like a bit of a break I mean typically at Microsoft things you know tended to get can we do it well if we can we're going to do it and I think that kind of built the reputation that you know I don't think people ever said X is underpowered they just said it doesn't do anything I want well you know when we're talking about earlier versions of Windows Mobile it seems like that's an experience that you guys are trying to get rid of I think one of things that people got really today it's just sort of just how new windows phone 7 is from a user experience perspective and and how much attention of detail around the user experience and both of the built-in shell and the built-in apps but also what developers are gonna be able to do in terms of building experiences apps on top of that and you know there's just such a great attention to detail the use of motion fluidity you I you know all hardware accelerated you know I think that's that's probably the biggest thing that people are going to notice when they use the experiences and you know I think we're making a good set of decisions around you know how do we balance making sure that that consumer experience is just it's just rock solid and you know really really appealing were actually another example I dad we've constrained the hardware spec so that there's a predictable bunch of hardware capabilities will be part of every phone so you know it's going to have location you know going to have a positive touchscreen how do you passive touch there's predictable screen sizes there's a GPS and Scott's team has done an amazing job in with this constraint to go make sure the development platform is deep rich and really easy for people to use and that's why I think we saw so many of the apps that his team worked with third parties today to take full advantage of all these capabilities in the phone because it was predictable and well-known up front so I think probably the last question that's on a lot of people's mind is one am I going to be able to get my hands on obviously today you guys release both developer tools and an emulator the phones themselves will be on the market by the holiday season is there something before then that where developers will be able to get their hands on actual devices well what developers have today is everything they need to build apps for the phone I mean they literally are getting a windows phone 7 series device that runs in and the emulations on their PC so you know tons of tons of people can download that today it's free over time you know we'll look for opportunities to connect more with those developers and find other ways to make them productive but today what we're excited about is is the work that Scott's team has done to empower and light up all the developers out there creative on all the apps that we show today we showed Netflix foursquare Shazam a major league soccer p newsreader a whole bunch more up seesmic bunch more applications is thing I'm most excited about was you know our partners were able to take early versions of the tools we ship today and start about three weeks ago in these apps and you know the feedback from everyone here is just being like oh they're so stunning and I want to lick them they're so good and you know that everyone on the web today can download the tools that we use to build those apps and the emulators hardware-accelerated supports multi-touch so the cool thing is everyone can build every one of those apps that we showed on stage today and we're pretty excited to see what comes out of it thanks guys thanks