News

Microsoft kicks off mobility dev conf - "Grow the ecosystem."

"The market is ready," said Microsoft Mobile VP Juha Christensen, as the company celebrated the second anniversary of the launch of its Pocket PC platform with a developer conference in London today,

The message is "Build the Ecosystem," as Microsoft tries to build momentum for its platform - offering to provide a forum from which it would not be taking revenue, to encourage developers to target Windows powered handhelds over alternatives like Symbian and Palm.

Games legend John Romero, demonstrating his new range of Monkeystone mobile games, starred as Christensen addressed a sell-out 1,000 strong audience of developers and mobile oems, all focused on the GSM/GPRS world.

There were also announcements -

the beta version of the .Net Compact framework is now available; copies of the development system were given to all delegates

Toshiba's new Pocket PC - described as the thinnest in the range, the E310 was demonstrated. It's 12 mm deep, and is the most "palm-like" of all the Microsoft-based handhelds so far

Peoplesoft Mobile was demonstrated both on a standard Pocket PC, and also on a Smartphone - a port of the standard laptop application which took just two days, said Christensen - it's based on IBM's portable version of DB2, "Everywhere" and uses either WiFi or GPRS to synchronise transactions.

Pong - or nearly Romero, author of the original "Doom" game showed a version of Breakout - beating a ball into a wall of bricks and demolishing it, and previewed a couple of other games, on both phone and PocketPC.

The Newswireless Net will bring reports from the show, as live as we can make them, during the next two days.

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