May?

It’s certain.

2.5 years of development, now deployed on WM6.x…. and now a dead end. No P/Invoke, no DB, no run-at-time, etc.

Bad deal, MS. I’ve been fooled for the LAST time. Hello, Linux on dedicated hardware.

Thanks – a good summary of Microsoft’s strategy.

Tim

MS doesn’t want to incrementally expand the Windows Mobile market; it’s dead in the water. You could say they’re gunning for the iPhone instead, but I think even that’s too small. MS would like you to use their software whenever you use a computer. They recognize that there are more phones than desktops and laptops, and that they’re becoming powerful enough to run real applications. They want a piece of that, a big one. They aren’t going to get there by trying to use Windows Mobile as a shoe in the door.

MS isn’t trying to “bring Windows Mobile back from the dead.” They’re trying to prevent the Windows brand from dying if average people start doing most of their computing on mobile devices.

Thanks for the comments. Yes, it’s the corporate devs that will mind; if the phone is a big success it will have been worth it.

Tim

The kicker is access to the underlying OS, on windows 32 I’d guess 10% of the C# apps I’ve written needed some from of unsafe or PInvoked access. For WP7 I’d guess the likelyhood is smaller (I presume the main UI is in managed code) but suppose the managed camera API doesn’t expose a means to change the exposure then I’d be unhappy if there wasn’t a way to PInvoke out. However in that case I’d understand if my app didn’t get into the App Store or cost more to get certified.

Microsoft have a real chance here to bring back Windows Mobile from the dead and third party devs will probably forgive the back-compatibilty break. Existing WinCE OEMS (I’m thinking barcode / stock taking etc) won’t care as they’ll be using WinCE6 which underpins WP7 and usually don’t use the full windows CE experience anyway. I suspect the only market segment MS will actually piss off with this are the corporate developers and I’m not sure how many of them are using the phone portion as more than a glorified modem.

My only worry here is quite how cagey MS are being over this. I hope I’m wrong and they’re not trying to put the “authorised code” genie back onto Windows Mobile (The early XDAs were locked down IIRC). On the other hand “authorised only” phones might crash less, most of my WinMo crashes / hangups have been down to third party apps particularly on the home screen.