Microsoft will have a 'Compelling and Dynamic End User Interface' in Windows Phone 8 Apollo

We knew that Apollo, the next update to Windows Phone, would be coming next year and now Microsoft has given the first hints at what to expect from it. In a job posting on the Microsoft Talent Network for a software development engineer on the Consumer Experience team, the company says that they will be  "stirring up the out of box experience for Windows Phone 8 and is committed to building/improving a compelling and dynamic high quality look and feel to our end user experience".
Considering how much Metro shook up the standard UI for mobile devices, if Apollo delivers even half of that, it will be pretty amazing. And of course the rumors about Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 having some sort of common features only make it more exciting.

[Source]

By Akshay Bakshi

Windows Phone Mango To Be Unveiled On September 1st? (Update: Joe Belfiore calls it a rumor)

Windows Phone Mango has been one of the hottest topics in rumor land. Mango went into RTM a few weeks ago and was officially launched in Japan. Now certain rumors are hinting at a release in  the IFA extravaganza in Berlin, that is between 1st and 7th September.

IFA is a consumer electronics show, or a one-stop spot for all things tech. Pocketlint has claimed that Microsoft is planning to release its most anticipated update at the extravaganza, providing it a large audience  for the operating system and the handsets by various OEMs. Rumors of devices and sightings of higher numbered Mango builds are definitely playing it nice with this release date. The Nokia device however is said to launch at Nokia's own event in October.

It seems that Mango will only be unveiled at IFA, with the actual updates happening a week or so after the announcement. The update is said to be a gradual one, perhaps like the NoDo one. The update will probably hit phones not tied to any carrier and will be soon followed by the others. This September definitely looks exciting and I don't think many (except Google and Apple) will be singing 'Wake Me Up When September Ends' (song by Green Day).

Update: Joe Belfiore calls it a rumor. We never said it was official, Joe :)

[Source]

By Sameer

Microsoft makes 3 times more money from HTC Android than Windows Phones in Q2

Remember those patents settlements Microsoft and HTC had ? Well, seems like they are starting to pay off as the latest reports show. After HTC released its Q2 results, Horace Dediu, Asymco analyst tweeted that Microsoft would have got $21 million from software licensing on the 1.4 million phones at $15 per handset. Also, it would have gotten $60 million as part of its patent settlement at $5 on the 12.1 million Androids HTC shipped last quarter.


[Source]

By Akshay Bakshi

Mango Ready For Manufactures, Undergoing Carrier Testing (Update : MS denies it)

Hear Hear, readers from far and wide, share the joy with your fellow Windows Phone users; Mango is ready. Manufacturers and carriers are being handed the release candidate of Mango as you read this. This early release plays wonderfully well with sightings of the Nokia Sea Ray, the Samsung Galaxy i-937 (Galaxy S II reincarnate) and, last but not least, Fujitsu’s debutante.


The Mango of my eye


The latest video of the Nokia Sea Ray, showed the build number as 7710. The latest developer build was 7661.  This brought about great speculation regarding the release date of Mango and when the 2nd generation devices would hit the market. If you want any more proof, Japan is expected to lead the Mango revolution with Fujitsu and ZTE handsets releasing their handsets in August.

This fall appears to be Mango season for everyone. Developers get ready to recompile your apps to make use of those 500 new APIs. Windows Phone owners get ready to taste a fruit so sweet, and non-Windows Phone users, ready to jump ship?

[Source]

Update: Bill Cox, Sr. Director of Communications at Microsoft for the Windows Phone Division, 

tweeted a while back denying reports suggesting that Mango has RTM'd.

By Sameer

Microsoft Releases Social ToDo App : Dotastic

Microsoft has released another app to its ever-growing marketplace, titled Dotastic. The Dotastic domain has had a 'coming soon' splash page up since Microsoft bought it in June 2011, and today the app is available for you to download. The app is basically a social todo list where you challenge your friends to finish their lists and earn points. Here's the official description :

Dotastic is a fun way to challenge your friends and help each other get things done. Earn points for completing tasks and compete with your friends to be at the top of the leaderboard. Incentives and social pressure helps you stay motivated as you complete your tasks and share your achievements with everyone.

Weirdly enough, the marketplace screenshot shows an iOS like bar at the bottom, though the rest of the UI seems Metro enough. Give it a try and tell us what you think!
[Source]

By Akshay Bakshi

Microsoft sued for Windows Phone Bedroom, Bathroom ads - Really ?

Remember those Microsoft Windows 7 ads depicting smartphone addicts who can’t put down their gadgets long enough to get busy in the bedroom and the bathroom? You loved them - right ?

Guess what, In a lawsuit filed this week with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Cellrderm alleges that Microsoft and Crispin Porter + Bogusky (the agency behind the ads) infringed upon the company’s copyrighted creative content.

The Microsoft ads, “Bedroom Really” and “Bathroom Really” were launched toward the end of 2010 and the Cellrderm ads show scenarios very similar to the Microsoft bedroom and bathroom ads. Cellrderm clearly had very less budget to produce the ads ( Don't ask me how - I can sense by the quality of lingerie used in the ads )

In the suit, Cellrderm asks for an injunction to prevent the further distribution of the Microsoft ads, as well as profits derived from the ads and other damages determined at trial.

We ask Cellrderm - Really ?

P.S : Damn, the chick in the Cellrderm ad *is* Hot !

By Karthik Ragubathy

Ballmer: 'All In' For Windows Phone

Steve Ballmer continued promoting Windows Phone and Microsoft's achievements at this years Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles. He said that Microsoft had no intentions of ditching their new operating system no matter what sales figures indicated. Ballmer admitted to the limited success “ We've gone from very small to very small but its been a heck of a year.
On a more encouraging note “A year ago, Microsoft had no Windows Phone. In the last year we’ve sold millions of phones.” He pointed out a recent survey that showed that 9 out of 10 owners of a windows phone handset would recommend it to a friend.


Faithful to my baby


He also stepped foot in the Nokia-Microsoft territory
 “Nokia, who had a choice this year to bet on themselves, to bet on Android or to bet on Windows Phone said for their bet, the company strategy, they’re going with Windows Phone. They saw our road maps, they saw what we’ve done, they saw what we’re planning on doing.”
Ballmer also revealed that Nokia is pushing Microsoft to go broader geographically with Windows Phone and hit new price points for devices. “They believe, others believe too."

Ballmer continued with the predictions by Gartner and IDC of Windows Phone reaching the no.2 spot by 2015 in the smart phone Market.

Ballmer concluded his keynote by saying that Microsoft was 'all in for Windows Phone' and would work very hard to remain competitive in the smart-phone market

“We know we’ve got a lot to do but like the Cloud, like NT many years back, we’re all in when it comes to mobile devices. And whether it’s phones or slates OR PCs or console devices, we’re certainly pushing extremely far and extremely fast.”

So does this hint at the four devices interconnected and sharing a cloud? The future holds the answer and is not too far away.








Source: winrumors

By Sameer

Windows Phone Developers Free To Share Their Mango

A few days ago Microsoft issued beta bits to the official developers but as per the download agreement weren't allowed to share any information, in the form of code, photographs, videos or screen shots, with anyone or publish them on the net. Well, not until Mango would be officially released.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the agreement (D'oh) saying it was a standard practice to prevent sharing of the pre-release code. The quote going "Permission to publish content, screen shots or comments based on this pre-release code can be obtained from Microsoft on a case-by-case basis.”

Contradicting the previous statement (Woohoo), a few days later, Cliff Simpkins, a Product Manager of Windows Phone, claimed that the action was taken to prevent developers from sharing pre-release code. He also added that developers were free to share screen shots and videos of the new version without having to fear Microsoft's ire.

Will you share your Mangoes with me?

With permission granted, expect to see lots of juicy news on WPsauce!

Source: WinRumors

By Sameer

Deep diving into Mango ROM reveals more juicy features

Chances be praised! Somehow I stumbled upon a dumped Mango ROM today. Unfortunately it is in the raw dumped form, which means a million little folders and scattered files. Without any means to flash it onto a device, I cracked it open, and carefully read through its entire user interface string files. From those files I have discovered some quite interesting features. Yes there has been a swarm of media previews/reviews on the web recently, but rest assured, a fair share of these features are not included in them. Now let’s briefly go through those extra juicy bits.

AppChecker
- AppChecker is the module which tells you “This app is required to open this type of file”. There’s a line “To join the meeting, you need Microsoft Lync Mobile. Install it now from Marketplace?” Yes, Lync is definitely coming to WP7. Maybe in the form of an app instead of being integrated to the OS.

People Hub
- Facebook integration will go even deeper. The People Hub will also show how many Likes an update has got.
- Found traces of Facebook check-in.
- People Hub will inform you when you are mentioned by some friend.

Battery saving mode
- This has been mentioned before. Mango brings battery saving mode. The phone could go into power saving mode every time the battery life is lower than a certain percentage. In this mode the phone will stop automatically syncing emails, and will shut down all apps running in the background. The phone will come out of this mode on its own when it’s plugged.

Calendar
- Maybe not mentioned elsewhere before. After Mango, the phone calendar will be able to show lunar dates. This is sure good news for us Asians. Don’t know if it means anything to everyone else though.

Email
- Yes linked inbox. Yes threaded conversation.
- You will be able to flag emails in Mango.

Messaging
- Aside from everything we’ve been hearing about all the time, apparently users can also send “nudge” (as in Live Messenger) to friends, from phone.
- You can invite other IM friends to make a multi-party conversation.

Xbox Live
- Hold tight, this is the big thing. First, you will be able to share your Xbox Live profile to Facebook.
- In the UI file of GameRes.dll: “Play a game, and invite a friend to play it with you.” Yes, multiplayer is coming to WP7. But hold tight a bit, there’s more.
- Also in the UI file of GameRes.dll: “Listen to this message on your Xbox 360”, “Read this message on your Xbox 360”. This must be more advanced cross-platforming. If you get messages through Xbox Live and feel the small screen is way too uninteresting to read on, turn to your faithful TV.
- “Invite you to a voice chat”, “Invite you to an Xbox Live party!” If I fancy it right, these fragments mean that both voice chat and virtual online party are coming to WP7 also. Sweeeet!

Office
- I’m not going to repeat what we already know. But there’s this line in Office 365’s UI file: “Lync is coming to Marketplace soon, so keep an eye out for it.” Double confirmed on Lync, and it might arrive a little bit later than the Mango.

Connectivity
- Apparently users could manually set IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, DNS and proxy for LAN connections.
- Apparently Mango supports these kind of Bluetooth devices: audio device, camera, computer, display, headset, keyboard/mouse, PDA, phone, printer, scanner, accessory, laptop, handheld, car. Some of these category named do not make much sense or conflict with one another, but well, that’s what the UI file says…
- Still no VPN support.

Phone general
- “This ringtone will be deleted from your phone, but not from your computer if you have it saved there.” “No custom ringtone, get more”. From the look of it, custom ringtones are coming with Mango indeed, and it might be done through Zune (PC).
- Mango, at least in this very ROM, supports 22 languages in all, each with its own input method.
- Several full-keyboard layouts: QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY.
- Input methods for all supported languages could be basically broken into 3 groups: full keyboard, 12 keys, and handwriting. With an extra BPMF for Taiwan region (Traditional Chinese).
- 12 keys inputs seem to have further customization options, like arranging keys by 1 through 3 rows.
- It looks like touch targets (aka virtual keys) for both QWERTY and 12-keys could be resized in system settings. Might be more fat-finger-friendly. The best virtual keyboard out there made even better.
- Users could choose to send customized dictionaries to Microsoft in order to help improving the input system.
That’s about the size of it. It’s a shame there’s no way to load the ROM on a real device yet. There must be even more changes, maybe overlooked by current reviewers, hidden in non-string related parts, like live tiles and buttons. But anyway, guess we are all glad to know more about the upcoming Mango, especially the gaming part.

By Chassit

Microsoft's Mobile Communication Division renamed to Windows Phone division

Eagle eyed Mary Jo Foley noticed a small yet significant in the bio page of Andy Lees who is the president of Windows Mobile Division. Apparently, he is now the president of Windows phone division. No, this isn't a separate division, Windows mobile division has been renamed by Windows phone division. In a response, Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the change and more importantly mentioned that " there’s no change in the unit’s responsibilities or charter ".

This doesn't come as a surprise. We are already quite aware that Microsoft wants to get rid of the Windows mobile tagline and move on to Windows Phone, which still needs a lot of work. I have seen plenty of people call WP7 OS as Windows 7 mobile or Windows Mobile 7 and Windows Mobile was such a disaster that Microsoft wants to erase it from people's memory for good. Windows mobile marketplace will stop accepting new applications next month i.e. end of Windows Mobile developer ecosystem, if there was any. Also native cloud based sync services are being discontinued along with Web marketplace for Windows Mobile in coming months (reported here), which will be replaced by Skydrive and Windows Phone web marketplace in coming months. It's clear  Windows Phone is the future. Renaming isn't much of a surprise but significant because it's clearly the end of Windows Mobile OS era atleast internally at Microsoft. 

By Rahul Mathur

Microsoft not venturing into dedicated portable gaming consoles anytime soon

In an interview to Pocket Link , Dennis Durkin, Microsoft’s chief operating and financial, crushed the rumors today suggesting that Microsoft were planning a dedicated portable gaming console to battle Nintendo 3DS and bitter rival Sony's PSP Vita. In fact, Dennis has questioned the viability of the business model of these dedicated portable consoles. More from the article quoted below:

They are very challenging markets as phones have got smarter, and we’ve chosen to make our bed around the phone instead and add Xbox Live services to Windows Phone 7 instead,” the exec insisted.
Microsoft hasn’t hidden the fact that it believes in it’s portable gaming experience should be experienced by phone users rather than those on a dedicated console, but it’s the first time the company as actively said that it doesn't see a dedicated version as viable.
And you can see why there isn’t a fuss about creating a device to take on the Sony PlayStation Vita or the Nintendo 3DS:
“Today on Windows Phone, Xbox Live games make up less than 1 per cent of the number of games that are on there. They are over 30 per cent of the units of the games downloaded on the phone, and they over 70 per cent of the revenue. That’s because consumers value the experience and integration of the game with Xbox Live.” added Marc Whitten, corporate vice president of Xbox LIVE.

 Clearly, past couple of years haven't been great for portable consoles but things might change this year with 3D gimmick from Nintendo and hardware beast from Sony. Microsoft is making the right decision here by targeting Windows Phone as the only portable gaming platform. They don't want developers targeting two different platforms; assuming a new portable device is launched, it will pack better hardware features and users will demand higher quality games that only the portable console could run while the phone users would suffer the infamous fragmentation / discrimination (sigh). It's important they keep building the momentum for Windows Phone, also the Xbox live integration needs to improve (more quality games, increase frequency of release, add multiplayer, etc) since it's the only way to beat the true king of portable gaming, iOS. Long road lies ahead for Microsoft, lot of work to do but everything seems to be on target. 

By Rahul Mathur

Watch Microsoft's E3 conference Live on Windows Phone

I bet you have been hunting for a way to watch live streaming of Microsoft's E3 conference on your Windows Phone, fear not. To watch the live conference, simply navigate to:

xbox.mobi/e3

If you are on your PC, you can watch the live stream at Gamespot and IGN. I hope you are pumped up for E3, just half an hour left for the event to begin. Several new games will be showcased, including some exclusive Windows Phone 7 games too. So stay tuned and come back here for relevant Windows Phone related information. Happy E3. 

By Rahul Mathur

Microsoft earns 5 times more from Android than it does from Windows phone !

Pretty sure you read this somewhat hilarious yet fact filled report which said that HTC pays Microsoft $5 for every Android device, yes - 5 dollars for every device. Why in the world is Microsoft getting paid for a device manufactured by HTC and running Android? Patent settlement. Microsoft and HTC reached patent settlement over intellectual property infringement. Now the patent settlement resulted in HTC paying Microsoft royalties.
It's not just HTC, Microsoft is also suing every single Android manufacturer and aiming for $7.50 to $12.50 per device. 

Analyst Horace Dediu  makes an interesting comparison with Windows phone :

A rough estimate of the number of HTC Android devices shipped is 30 million. If HTC paid $5 per unit to Microsoft, that adds up to $150 million Android revenues for Microsoft.

Microsoft has admitted selling 2 million Windows Phone licenses (though not devices.) Estimating that the license fee is $15/WP phone, that makes Windows Phone revenues to date $30 million.

So Microsoft has received five times more income from Android than from Windows Phone.

Read complete article here.

Note - $15 per windows phone is a working assumption, Asymco clarified this to me on twitter.

Try to put yourself in the place of OEMs, what would you think would be a logical step now that Microsoft has proved with mango update that Windows phones has the caliber to compete aggressively with iOS and Android, drop in your thoughts. It's a win win situation for Microsoft because they get paid anyways. Now they need to buck up, push next gen windows phone devices with improved hardware and sue more android manufacturers to disrupt the market. They have won me over with their OS anyways, which is quite obvious.

Source : BI and Asymco 

By Rahul Mathur

Windows Phone To Get Better Bluetooth Support Soon ?

Job listings are usually major indicators of future plans for a company. So, we can surely look at this listing on Microsoft Careers and hope for some changes in Windows Phone's current (limited) bluetooth profile support which primarily consists of Phone Book Access , Headset Profile and A2DP.

The ad specifically call for a person with 'Hands-on Bluetooth protocol expertise' and 'Experience implementing recent Bluetooth profiles, on any OS platform' , which is a pretty major hint. It seems Microsoft is definitely doing everything it can to bring up the Windows Phone features on par and even exceed other platforms.

Software Development Engineer – MCB – Windows Phone (755403) Job

Location: Redmond, WA, US

Job Category: Software Engineering: Development

Location: Redmond, WA, US Job ID: 755403-40843

Division: Windows Phone Division
In this world, there are few chances to work on a product which will change the industry, when all eyes are on you. Most people go through their entire career without ever experiencing the excitement and anticipation of working for such a product. You don’t have to.

Come join the Windows Phone Client team to define and build experiences that will propel Microsoft to the top of the most competitive market in years! We’ve just shipped Windows Phone 7 to accolades from delighted press/bloggers and customers, and are busy building on that momentum.

We’re looking for a sharp developer to help us in our quest to deliver the best Bluetooth experience of any smartphone platform.

What we need from you:

• Hands-on Bluetooth protocol expertise
• Solid design and C/C++ development skills (3+ years experience)
• Passionate about shipping a high quality product
• A strong desire to constantly improve yourself and the people around you
• A BS degree in CS or equivalent
• The ideal candidate will also have:
  • An MS degree in CS or equivalent
  • Experience implementing recent Bluetooth profiles, on any OS platform
  • Experience with Windows driver or kernel development
  • Track record of working through multiple full product cycles

The Connectivity team in Windows Phone owns all the OS Platform software which connects our users with their friends & family: cellular voice & data, IP networking stacks, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, as well as Location Services (hey, it’s harder to connect if you’re lost). We offer a lot of interesting variety because we work with a range of hardware platforms and cellular technologies. Our new phones are designed by Nokia and other leading OEMs, and operate every day on the world’s top mobile networks.

[Source via WMPoweruser]

By Akshay Bakshi

Microsoft Will Get Qik As Part Of Skype Deal

While Microsoft's acquisition of Skype is underway, you might be wondering about the acquisition Skype made earlier this year. Yes, I am talking about Qik, the mobile video streaming service which was bought for $121 million earlier this year.

It has been confirmed that Microsoft will get Qik as a bonus in the whole deal. On inquiring with MS representatives, we were pointed to an earlier blog post by Tony Bates about the the technologies that Qik was bringing to Skype.

Skype will have its own division within Microsoft and integration with the Windows Phone platform will be a key focus. Skype has apps for Android, iOS and Windows Mobile and so does Qik, so it seems they will do more than an app for Windows Phone, integrating video chat capabilities deep into the OS itself. Quoting Bates from a conference :

Mobile is clearly moving to be a rich communications capability above and beyond just voice. We introduced two-way video recently in terms of our iPhone products and our Android products, and we’ll work together with Microsoft to keep enhancing and enriching those, and you can see just how much video is going to dominate the traffic as we look for the next few years. It’s one of the fastest-growing parts of the industry, and Skype’s well-positioned.

While only time will tell how beneficial this deal turns out to be for Microsoft, it can surely be called a good deal for Skype.

By Akshay Bakshi

Microsoft Research Releases Free Dictionary And Translator App for Windows Phone Called Engkoo

Microsoft Research has released a new free app, Engkoo for Windows Phone. Its a dictionary and translator built on technologies developed in the Microsoft labs. It currently supports English-English and English-Chinese(simplified) only. You can define, translate words and phrases, pronounciation , spelling correction and pinyin input. You can view more screenshots at the source link. Quoting from the Microsoft Research site :

Engkoo is a technology for exploring and learning language, now powering the Bing Dictionary product in China. It is built primarily by mining translation knowledge from billions of web pages – using the Internet to catch language in motion. Currently Engkoo is built for Chinese users who are learning English; however the technology itself is language independent and can be extended in the future.

At a system level, Engkoo is an application platform that supports a multitude of NLP and Speech technologies such as cross language retrieval, alignment, sentence classification, statistical machine translation, text-to-speech, and phonetic search. The data set that supports this system is primarily built from mining a massive set of bilingual terms and sentences from across the web. Specifically, web pages that contain both Chinese and English are discovered and analyzed for parallelism, extracted and formulated into clear term definitions and sample sentences. This approach allows us to build the world’s largest lexicon linking both Chinese and English together – at the same time covering the most up-to-date terms as captured by the net. In addition, our data set is intelligently merged with licensed data from sources including Microsoft Office and Encarta. Finally, the resulting vast, ranked, high quality composite data set is analyzed by a machine learning based classifier, allowing users to filter down sample sentences by combinable categories.

Download it from the marketplace right now.

[Source]

By Akshay Bakshi

Microsoft buys Skype for $ 8.5 billion,WP7 to finally get a Facetime and Google voice competitor

Big breaking news coming in. Microsoft has finalized the deal to buy Skype for a whopping 8.5 billion dollars in an all cash deal, confirmed by WSJ.

This comes as a surprising move since we have seen a significant amount of rumors suggesting that Facebook was trying hard to buy Skype and integrate it with it's services. But now, here we have Microsoft ( an investor in Facebook ) who ended up buying Skype. Overall, it's a win win situation for Facebook. Microsoft being an investor, will open up Skype services to Facebook and integration in the near future is a big possibility.

Skype deal is benefiting Microsoft from both the enterprise and consumer segment. They now have a significant power to compete against Google and Cisco in the enterprise collaboration market. Not only that, most importantly with Windows Phone 7 - I can sense Skype integration coming very very soon in the near future. So now Microsoft offers you Facebook, XBL, Office, Twitter, Skype native integration on a WP7 device - I think it's a killer combination - undeniably something which companies like Google and Apple should be scared of.

Google has Google voice / Gtalk ( with video chat ), iOS has Facetime but what about Windows Phone 7 ? We still don't have the rumored WLM client which we have all been waiting for. Skype clearly gives WP7 the edge over other platforms when native integration comes in, clearly Skype users are in the majority ( in terms of number of users ) and cross platform nature of Skype gives it an even bigger advantage over FaceTime. Clearly, Microsoft is playing this game to win it. Another advantage is that in 2012, a secondary camera might just become a ' must have ' feature for WP7 devices or Microsoft might just end up forcing OEM to stick a front facing camera to get the best of both worlds.

What happens to Lync ? Well, we'll have to wait and find out. Until then, keep drooling! Hope we get to know more about this soon. Tell us what you think.

By Rahul Mathur

Microsoft explains the "Walshed" Windows Phone NoDo update , Fix Coming

Used Chris Walshie's method to update your WP7, and now are unable to go past the NoDo update (build 7390) ? There's some good news for you, Microsoft has approved a fix for the people who used the ChevronWP7 updater.

ChevronWP7 updater was a tool created by Chris Walsh, to allow users to update their WP7 device before the official update by carriers. Using the ChevronWP7 updater could put the device into a state, where its unable to receive future updates and reflashing it would be the only fix, says Microsoft.

Quoting Brandon Watson from Windows Phone Developer Blog :

Phones updated via the unsupported method do not contain an official image and cannot be updated further at this time. Due to scheduling of engineering resources, we did not anticipate having to undue the changes made to phones by these unsupported methods. While we are not ruling out having a fix in the future, for now there is no fix.

In the blog post, Watson also tells that users trying to update their Walshed phones using the Zune software would receive a 80180048 error. Even if you try to get your phone replaced via a manufacturing return, the operators will know the situation due to the error code and its upto them to decide what to do. Still, its not all bad.

We understand that this isn’t ideal. Unfortunately, our engineering priorities are focused on improving the process by which updates get to Windows Phone, issuing the security update you just got and working to getting Mango to market. Undoing this specific problem was not in our schedule.

However, the creators of the unsupported tool are a clever bunch, and wanted to get a timely fix created for customers who have put their phones into this state. They believe they have created a way to get these phones back on the officially supported path. We will work with them to validate their solution and applaud the team for taking responsibility to do this.

The ChevronWP7 team has already tweeted that a fix has been approved and more details will emerge soon. Still, nowhere has Microsoft mentioned that the Walshing of phones wouldn't have happened if so much had not gone wrong with the NoDo. After this is all fixed, users may well forgive Microsoft is the king of fruits arrives in a timely manner for everyone.

By Akshay Bakshi

Microsoft TouchStudio updated to provide more access, scripting on phone now even more fun!

Microsoft released TouchStudio a month back much to delight of thousands of WP7 device owners. Basically touch studio enabled users to create tiny yet useful scripts with barely any coding experience required,  something which isn't common on other mobile platforms.

Script your phone! TouchStudio is a radically new software development environment on the Windows Phone, bringing the excitement of the first programmable personal computers to the phone. Bring your songs and pictures to life, and use the sensors on the phone. You write code by tapping on the screen. TouchStudio comes with many samples that you can tweak.

Here is the Release Note for Ver. 1.1 beta  :

• Many bug fixes
• Better auto-completion in expression editor
• Access to accelerometer, location, maps, translation services, web search, tile customization, charting, and more.

Notable new APIs:

• senses->acceleration quick/smooth/stable: Access to accelerometer
• locations->*: Access to GPS/geo-coordinates
• maps->*: Access to Bing maps
• languages->*: Access to Bing- and Hawaii-based translation services
• web->search *: Searching the web with Bing
• tile->*: Configuration of script tile properties
• math->create number map: charting functionality

Notable API changes:

old API	new API
engine->assert	time->fail if not
engine->stop	time->stop
phone->sleep	time->sleep
phone->now	time->now
json->get field	json->field
json->get boolean	json->boolean
json->get number	json->number
json->get string	json->string
senses->snap camera picture	senses->take camera picture
senses->has camerea picture	senses->has taken camera picture
senses->camera picture	senses->taken camera picture
web->deep zoom link	web->link deep zoom
web->hyperlink	web->link url
web->image link	web->link image

Zune download link 

In short, more access. More the merrier, I say. Do show us what you come up with !

By Rahul Mathur

Microsoft Releases Developer Tool To Port iOS Applications To Windows Phone

There's no doubt that Apple currently leads the appstore race, atleast in terms of numbers, but Microsoft seems to be determined to do everything they can to woo developers for their WP7 platform. They have announced an API mapping tool : iPhone/iOS to Windows Phone API mapping tool.

Announced on the Windows Phone Developer blog, the tool is described as a sort of translation dictionary for quickly porting snippets of iOS code to C# equivalents.

With this tool, iPhone developers can grab their apps, pick out the iOS API calls, and quickly look up the equivalent classes, methods and notification events in WP7. A developer can search a given iOS API call and find the equivalent WP7 along with C# sample codes and API documentations for both platforms.

For the current version, three types of APIs are supported : Network / Internet, User Interface and Data Management. Though they do not plan to provide mapping for all the APIs that iOS has, they do plan to improve and expand the scope in later versions.

Microsoft has also published a 90-page+ whitepaper titled "Windows Phone 7 Guide for iPhone Application Developers". Microsoft has also given devs an option to suggest which APIs they would like mapped and they have also begun a series of "developer stories" in which devs share their experiences and reason for porting apps to Windows Phone 7.

Microsoft is definitely following its "Developers! Developers! Developers!" motto and the upcoming Nokia-Microsoft dev engagement initiatives are only going to boost developer interest in Windows Phone. You can get the tool, whitepaper and other resources at the source link.

[Source via ZDNet]

By Akshay Bakshi