The future of the Windows Phone platform is revealed: multitasking, IE9 and GPU acceleration of web pages, integration with Kinect, and more.

Just recently, in the course of Steve Ballmer’s movie show , Microsoft unveiled some plans for the development of the Windows Phone platform during 2011. Several announcements were made concerning the Microsoft services associated with Windows Phone and several announcements related to the platform itself, the operating system, and the development of applications for it.

Let's go through the announcements in order.
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Results from the release of WP7

First, Microsoft notes the high level of customer satisfaction from Windows Phone 7. According to the company, the level of satisfaction with the product is 93%, and every ninth consumer will recommend to buy Windows Phone 7. These are very high rates and the company is clearly pleased with the results achieved.

The company announces the sale of two million licenses for Windows Phone 7 to phone manufacturers during the first two months from the day of the start of sales.

Microsoft reported that the number of applications in the Windows Phone Marketplace store exceeded 8,000 pieces. 28,000 official developers of Windows Phone 7 have been registered and a free Visual Studio for Windows Phone 7 package designed for developing applications for a mobile platform has been downloaded more than a million times.

Future innovations in Windows Phone

During the kinouta, a number of innovations were announced, which will be received by phones based on Windows Phone 7 later this 2011.



Internet Explorer 9 will be transferred to Windows Phone 7 in the same form as it is on the desktop. This means broad support for modern web standards and GPU-acceleration of all graphics subsystems, including HTML5 Video in FullHD. IE9 on Windows Phone 7 already exists in the test builds of the operating system. During the demonstration, we were shown the operation of the WP7 device with the IE9 browser in the FishIE Tank test, where the browser accelerated using the GPU showed excellent results. Safari, which was lying next to the iPhone 4 with the browser, demonstrated a too noticeable lag in speed due to the lack of hardware acceleration of work with graphics.

Multitasking support for third-party applications will appear . What many IT enthusiasts have been saying for so long about will happen later in 2011: third-party Windows Phone 7 applications will be able to work in multitasking mode. During the presentation, it was shown how multitasking will be implemented.

By clicking the Return button, the user will be able to go to the previous window, and the working application at this point will not be completed as it is today, but will remain in memory and will be able to handle the context switching event, for example, the game may pause. We were shown how, during a game in the airplane simulator, the speaker went to the main menu of the system, where he could launch any application, write SMS or reply to mail, and then he returned to the game, which automatically paused. Turning off the pause, the game continued.



See the screenshot above. This is a panel of running applications, an analogue of Alt-Tab in Windows. The user can make a long press on the Return button to get to the animated list of thumbnails of running applications. Moving between the list items, the user can switch to the application he needs. Everything is as in a normal desktop operating system. In the demonstration, this switching mode worked extremely quickly, the transition to the list occurred without delay, switching to tasks was performed instantly.

Another multitasking scenario was also demonstrated: playing Internet radio with a third-party application in the background after the user switched to another application or to the main menu. Moreover, such applications will receive an API to provide quick access to the management of music by the user (pause, stop ... from the pop-up menu).



All owners of Windows Phone 7 will be able to use the free SkyDrive cloud storage of 25 gigabytes to store office documents. The Office subsystem will respectively receive integration with SkyDrive and will be able to identify and upload not only your documents, but also your friends' documents, if they share them for you.

A huge surprise was the announcement of the integration of Windows Phone 7 devices with an innovative Xbox 360 Kinect sensor . Let me remind you that Kinect was sold in a circulation of 8 million units in just 60 days. What makes it the fastest selling gadget in history. How the integration of WP7 and Kinect will look can be seen in the following video (the real game on real hardware is demonstrated):



There will be a built-in integration with the social network Twitter at the level of the existing integration with Facebook.



Very soon, users of the networks of Sprint and Verizon operators in the United States will receive the appropriate versions of Windows Phone 7 based phones that support CDMA networks .

It was confirmed that Windows Phone 7 users will receive the first system update in early March , which will bring the Copy / Paste function and significantly speed up the download of silverlight applications.

Agreement with Nokia

During the kinouta, the agreement with Nokia, which will use Windows Phone 7 as the main mobile platform for its smartphones, was once again communicated. Microsoft says that based on this agreement, all WP7 vendors will appreciate the benefits of joint development of the platform with Nokia, since innovations, such as updated Bing maps with Ovi Maps (NAVTEQ), will be available to all. And not only on the mobile platform. Steve Ballmer said that the benefits of integrating Bing and Ovi Maps will be felt by all Bing users, wherever they use the service.

Conclusion

The list of updates for Windows Phone 7 can only cause approval: multitasking with convenient switching between applications, modern web standards and GPU acceleration of graphics in the browser, the ability of the browser to play FullHD video, integration with Kinect, Twitter, access to the dedicated cloud storage large volume.

All these innovations will allow even better to compete in the market of mobile devices. The alliance with Nokia and the possible release of the first devices from this company at the time of the release of the update can give the platform considerable popularity as early as 2011.

Let's wait.