With the coming rollout of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft says it’s hitting an “inflection point.” The company is billing its new mobile operating system as a dramatic departure from its current Windows Mobile offering.
As a result, Windows Phone 7 devices won’t support apps developed in the Windows Mobile 6.x environments, Enterprise Mobile Today reports. Instead, developers will work in the newer technologies, like Silverlight for media presentation, .NET and XNA for gaming and runtime.
Microsoft has confirmed that applications written to run on its aging Windows Mobile 6.x phone operating system will not run on its brand new mobile OS.
In designing its forthcoming Windows Phone 7 Series mobile device operating system, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) had to do a “reset” of what it has been doing in the phone handset market in the past, according to a recent post by Microsoft’s Charlie Kindel at his Windows Phone Development blog.
“Developers, designers and producers of applications, games and content these days are demanding that we be different,” Kindel’s post said. That’s a major reason why the newly introduced system has a brand new user interface (UI) — it bears a resemblance to Microsoft’s Zune HD UI instead of using the older Windows Mobile UI.
As part of the reset, Microsoft not only imposed physical requirements — such as three dedicated buttons for Home, Back and Search — but also additional UI design specifications, including support for multitouch screens.