The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Microsoft has announced a competition with the most downloaded free application and the commercial application with the highest revenue by December 31st receiving prizes. Of course, Loke-Uei says, “the actual prize is being first to the market place.”
In stark contrast to the bad publicity Apple is gathering over its mysterious and arcane rejection policies Microsoft state their Marketplace inclusion guidelines are clear and explicit. Developers will not need to trust fate as they submit code to an uncertain black box process hoping an approval comes out the other end. Instead, if their program is rejected they’ll know why.
The guidelines prohibit porn and other questionable content as well as voice-over-IP (VoIP) applications.
Additionally, any program which replaces the core SMS, e-mail and media player experiences will also be rejected from the Marketplace.
Loke-Uei clarified that alternate media players and other programs can be developed and sold, just they cannot install themself to become the default media player (or e-mail program or SMS program.)
There is no similar clause for the web browser.
Marketplace applications can be searched online, and on the device itself, by category, newness, price and other criteria. Additionally, business and consumer applications will be separated meaning corporate users can search for inventory or CRM software without needing to wade through games or other entertainments.
Windows Mobile 6.5 is still built on top of the Windows Mobile CE 5 architecture. Loke-Uei conceded this meant users will still find devices crashing and requiring a reboot. He explains this architecture is the biggest cause of dissatisfaction and complaints that Windows Mobile is less stable than BlackBerry and iPhone smartphones.
This architecture has memory and process limitations which date back to a simpler time. He likens it to the old days of MS-DOS where special drivers like himem.sys and 4GW were necessary to make use of memory above 640KB.
Consequently, users are running more and more applications on their Windows Mobile device and the core kernel fails beyond a certain amount of concurrent in-memory programs.
An improved Windows CE 6 architecture has been developed but this is not used by Windows Mobile 6.5 and will not be seen until a later release.
In the meantime, Microsoft is seeking to educate both users and developers. For users the task manager will now be clearly shown on the home screen allowing quick access to close down unnecessary running apps. For developers the message is to include an “exit” button which actually shuts down the program and removes it from memory.
Additional best practices are being shared with developers to help them understand how to load programs into higher memory ranges.
Loke-Uei told iTWire that the Windows Mobile team had learned a lot from the Zune team, leveraging their experiences in tight user interfaces and small form-factor devices. He did however say, despite this collaboration, “there will never be a Zune phone.”
Disclaimer: David M Williams is attending Tech-Ed as a guest of Microsoft.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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