Posts by David 84

The smartphone market is in its infancy

From the comments you'd think that the market for smartphones was mature but the iPhone was only released 4 years ago and Android has come from virtually nothing in 2009 to over 30% now.

This is clearly a market in its infancy and one that Nokia screwed up because it could not get the software right and clearly wasn’t going to any time soon.

There are clearly risks in dumping Symbian and going for WP7 but Microsoft has committed billions to making it work and Window Phone 7 is not Windows Mobile with a UI facelift, it is a new platform.

I’ve been an iPhone fanboy since 2007 but a Windows developer for 30 years so the chance to write apps for WP7 was of particular interest and have recently had my first app published. There are thousands of professional developers like me who are going to create apps – the developer community for Microsoft is incredibly strong and vibrant.

I’m also interested in Windows 8 and am fully expecting a good level of compatibility between the two, push compatibility onto the Xbox as well and hopefully Microsoft will make this a serious 3 way race.

Interesting times....

WP7

Seems to me that the vast majority of posters know little or nothing about WP7. I've come to expect a general loathing of MSFT from El Reg comments but even so there appears to be some very blinkered responses here.

I make my living out of writing software for the MSFT technology stack and have done very well out of it over the years so was pretty interested in WP7 and from what I have seen so far it delivers on all fronts, good UI, good tech spec, integration with Marketplace and XBox live and most importantly for me and thousands of other MSFT developers: a great dev environment, Silverlight, XNA, c# and Visual Studio 2010.

Apple have redefined the smartphone market - twiddly keyboards, pens and other crap have been consigned to the dustbin. Android has largely copied Apple but not learnt from history - the platform is horribly fragmented which is already causing grief for many developers. By locking the hardware spec Microsoft have learnt the lesson of their own history and have a stable platform, a Nokia variant of this is entirely on the cards (I know that's a contradiction - but this is a big partnership and Nokia is supposed to be good at hardware).

Oh and before I'm flamed - I'm not a Microsoft bigot either - I have an iPhone4 and my kids have Nokia N95. I also had a Sony P900i which was a pain in the arse...

Bring it on...

Glad this has resurfaced - seems like an obvious win-win for both companies. WIn 7 is a great mobile OS and Nokia have the hardware and an existing mobile consumer marketing machine that MSFT clearly lack.

Sadly Symbian failed years ago and nobody in their right mind - especially small dev teams - will devote any effort to supporting it. Crying shame but it was developed for a different time when hardware was much less functional.

Despite the normal anti-MSFT sentiment Win 7 is a great platform to develop for. Both Silverlight and XNA are very well structured with deep functionality and as a MSFT .NET developer I can leverage all my skills that I have spent the last 20 years developing.