Boy, we were a tough crowd. The Windows Phone 7 leadership, marketing, project management folks plied us with food and beverage, but as a room full of tech journalists, were were naturally skeptical. Windows Phone 7, eh? Not Windows Mobile 7? The questions will remain until MIX in Las Vegas, 2 weeks from now, but here's what the Windows Phone 7 folks told us tonight...
- Windows Phone 7 development will be focused on Silverlight, but all of the .NET languages will work.
- XNA will be the games development platform, plus Games for Windows Live, or Xbox Live, or whatever you want to call it.
- There will be an App store
- The interface has been designed from the ground up for usability, rather than for consistency with the Windows brand.
- Devices will be coming from most manufacturers and all the carriers.
- The SDK will enable "cheap" development. They did not say free, though Charlie Kindel, who's heading up the whole project, said that his team understood that the other leading platforms offered free SDKs.
- Kindel and his team were molded in the image of the Xbox team: that is, a team beyond reproach, small, and given free reign within Microsoft.
- From my visual experience with the prototype/not-for-production device, the interface is super simplified, and well imagined.
- Realization? Well... Kindel had trouble getting his flashlight application to work... Only took 6 lines of code to write, though!