According to Sudeep Bharati, director, developer tools for Microsoft India’s Visual Studio Team, the company is working with manufacturers to come up with lower-end phones for the Indian market.

‘Windows Phone 7’ is Microsoft’s upcoming mobile operating system and series of phones that Microsoft hopes will revive its presence in the mobile market, which is dominated by Apple and BlackBerry in the US and by Nokia in developing countries. In India, this means generating phones that offer a cost-advantage to the competitively priced Nokia phones.

“We are working on phones with 2 chassis, one with a screen resolution of 800*480 and the other with a lower resolution of 480*320. Phones with chassis 1 will be available by the end of 2010,” says Bharati.

The lower-end models will have at least 128 MB RAM, a lower-end processor and a 5 megapixel camera, unlike the higher-end models that need to have 1Ghz CPU GPS chip and 1GB of RAM.

The company is still in talks with hardware manufacturers on the feasibility of the plan and the pricing of these phones.

The higher-end models are expected to be priced similar to the Nexus One, which is available for $529 in the US. It is expected that the lower-end phones would be priced lower than Rs20,000.

Google too had earlier mentioned plans to release a stripped- down version of Nexus One in India this year.

Microsoft has laid special emphasis on the graphical component of the phone as games will come with Xbox Live support, which will allow users to play a game on their mobile, save it, continue the same game on their PCs and finish it on their Xbox 360.

Bharati also said that he’s expecting developers to release Live games which can be played on all three platforms as a package.

The tools that developers can use to make these games – Visual Studio 2010, Expression Blend – were developed under him at the Hyderabad centre of Microsoft. “Developers can make their games compatible for all the platforms using the same code. They don’t have to write separate applications for each platform. Also, games can be written for the phone using Silverlight as well,” he added.

Silverlight, Microsoft’s competitor to Adobe’s Flash, has seen a lot of developments with version 4 to be released later this year. At Microsoft Tech Ed, which was organised in Bangalore last week, a few of the developers demonstrated a way to make a fully interactive 3D object using Silverlight. The 3D capabilities of Silverlight will come in handy when developing games as well.

Resource:
http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_microsoft-s-special-india-plans_1374157

Microsoft, which launched the Silverlight 4 Release Candidate at its MIX10 event last month, is positioning Silverlight 4 as a tool for developing line of business applications as well as a way to move the classic Windows Forms and ASP.Net/Ajax into a more modern user experience. Silverlight 4’s hooks to SharePoint 2010, Office, and Internet Information Services (IIS) also reflect this business focus.

Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s .Net Developer Platform, will deliver the news in a keynote at the DevConnections conference in Las Vegas. It’s been a busy couple of months for Guthrie, who presided over last month’s launch of the Windows Phone 7 development platform, which is powered by Silverlight.

Microsoft’s choice of Silverlight — the full Silverlight programming model, not a mobile version — as the platform for native Windows Phone 7 application development has sent a charge through the software giant’s army of developers. Windows Mobile didn’t provide much incentive to this group, but Silverlight — which is based on .NET — is right up their alley.

Microsoft is now offering the Windows Phone 7 development toolkit as a free download, a package that includes Silverlight, Expression Blend for Windows Phone and a preview of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express.

Microsoft is also planning to launch Visual Studio 2010 on April 12, a release that includes technology that helps programmers bridge the .Net and Java worlds, as well as Windows Azure templates for moving code between cloud and on-premise applications.

Resource:
http://www.crn.com/software/224202066

The Silverlight browser plug-in started out back in 2006 as a project called WPF/e – Windows Presentation Foundation Embedded – or as the team also called it, WPF Everywhere.

The idea was that it would ship for the browser in 2007 and then on Windows Mobile by the end of the year. Although Microsoft has demonstrated Silverlight Mobile several times since then, it’s only just arriving on mobile.

The Symbian beta is available now and Windows Phone Series 7 treats it as much more than an add-on; it’s one of the only two ways to write Windows Phone apps.

The version of Silverlight that will be on Windows Phone (that you can already try out with the emulator in the free Windows Phone Developer tools) is closer to the desktop version than you might expect (and it’s hardware accelerated like Silverlight on the desktop).

“This isn’t Silverlight ‘lite’, it isn’t Silverlight ‘different’, it is Silverlight,” corporate vice president Scott Guthrie told TechRadar. It includes “all the APIs of the current Silverlight version 3 and quite a bit of Silverlight 4; it’s a superset plus some extras”.

The difference is less about what the phone can run and more about thinking about what you need on a phone. “Pretty much all the features that we think are mobile-specific, that you’d want in the phone, are there,” says Guthrie.

“There are features like printing and more business features that don’t necessarily make sense in the phone, but all the graphics, the access to the webcam and microphone, those we already have.”

Optimising Silverlight for phones

Microsoft has also done a lot of optimisation of the way Silverlight is rendered on Windows Phone, mainly, says Guthrie, “because on the phone you have ARM processors typically and instead of one giant one you have about four cores the more work you’re doing on a processor – one quarter of an Arm processor – the slower your app is going to be. So we did a lot of work to partition the graphics operators out across multiple CPUs, and the animation system. We have to do that because otherwise you can’t get above 12 frames per second.”

Interestingly, he promises that those improvements will make their way back to desktop Silverlight; “probably in an update to Silverlight 4 and certainly by [the next version]”.

The other main difference between Windows and Windows Phone is that Silverlight on the desktop supports multi-tasking (it’s based on the Windows standard .NET components); although Guthrie says the Windows Phone OS is “a multi-tasking OS” third party Silverlight apps won’t run in the background.

One reason is battery life: “As soon as you allow arbitrary apps in the background, you run things down”.

The other is stability: “typically,” he claims, “when Windows crashes, it’s a driver – but you don’t blame your USB mouse, you blame Windows. We’re trying to be careful in terms of not providing a hand grenade for people to play with and not realise they can blow themselves up. We’re trying to make sure the user experience is good out of the box.”

For users frustrated by the notion that, say, the route in their navigation app would go away if they answer a phone call, he promises that the team is listening to feedback and “we’re going to continue to innovate and learn”.

Resource:
http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/how-much-of-silverlight-is-in-windows-phone-7–678987