Windows Phones gets a lot of Bling

 Today the twitterverse is occupied with news of skype releasing apps for iphone. Well, that is old news for Windows Phone users: http://skype.com/download/skype/windowsmobile/

But today, Microsoft Phones are getting a lot of bling.. Here’s some of the bling it is getting:

1. MySpace now enables use of Silverlight on their site
   With its rich media capability is going to be a big help to all the musicians and actors on myspace :).. Tomorrow, the SDK to develop this application will be released on the CodePlex Open Source site.
   In addition, Windows Phone will also be getting an app for Myspace users soon. In fact, plan is to enable Windows Phone users to experience other  social networks right from their Windows phone, including Facebook and Windows Live.
2. Windows Marketplace for Mobile
   Windows Marketplace had been announced earlier (to be available later in the year) and today they talked about few additional things. Marketplace will be available as an Windows Phone application on Win Mobile 6.5. Customers will have the option to purchase applications on Windows Marketplace for Mobile with a credit card or have charges appear directly on their phone bill. In addition, people will be able to return an application after purchase within 24 hours for a full refund. Microsoft also announced today that developers will now be able to deliver updates to their applications for free throughout the application lifecycle.
   It costs USD 99 for developers to onboard an app in the Marketplace and they get to keep 70% of the revenue generated from their apps. 
   Microsoft announced it partnership with a lot of companies (representing the top-selling categories of mobile applications) who will be onboarding their apps to Marketplace including EA mobile, Accuweather, Resco, Spb Software
3. New Themes from professional designers
   Microsoft has announced new partnerships with the Design Museum London and Council of Fashion Designers of America to will offer a variety of free designer themes for Windows phones.
4. Make your own theme
   A new Theme Generator will be made available to personalize Windows phone. The Theme Generator will be available at http://www.windowsmobile.com later this year. The theme generator will enable Windows phone users to select pictures from their PC to set as background images, as well as choose colors to personalize their navigation bar, scroll bar and highlighted text. Once finished, their personal theme will be sent to their phone.
5. Windows Live for Mobile and Hotmail
   A new version of Windows Live for Mobile will be available for free download this week for customers in 25 languages. Windows Live for Mobile includes mobile versions of Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Contacts, Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft Live Search and enhanced photo upload capabilities.
   This will be available for Windows Mobile 6.x phones at http://wl.windowsmobile.com on April 2.

Come to think of it, Microsoft is embracing all the good things it has learnt from the mobile developments in the past and incorporating them at a rapid pace. However, lack of low end phones still continue to hinder its wide scale adoption. Now would someone offer me a Rs. 10,000 Windows Phone?

To see a browser – Take off its clothes

This is from a recent trip that I took and met few people who were Firefox users. Most of them were using FireFox at home and IE at work.. and most of them felt that FireFox was “faster” –meaning it would load websites faster and FF itself would load faster..

So, I devised this test and called it the “Naked Browser” challenge. Are you upto taking this? Here is what were are trying to do – kill most of the add-ons in IE and then test it against FF. Here are some step by step instructions -

1. Make sure you are running the IE8 Release Candidate 1. To make sure that you are on this version, just go to IE Help menu and click on “About Internet Explorer”. you should see Release Candidate 1 mentioned as follows:
2. Go to Tools –> Manage Add-Ons. In the Manage Add-Ons window, click on each Application and disable the add-on. You can can disable the add-on by clicking on the “Disable” button located at bottom right, once you have selected the application in the upper window.
3. Next, change the home page for both browsers to the same website of your choice.
4. Finally, close all the browser windows on your machine. You are all set for the challenge to start.
5. Browser load test: Start both the browsers by clicking on the shortcuts on the taskbar one after the another. What browser did you see come up faster?
6. Browsing Speed test: Type your favourite website address in notepad and copy it in memory (Ctrl + C). then in each browser, paste the URL (Ctrl+v) and press go button. Watch for the status bar at the bottom of browser window to say “Done”. Which browser completed loading the website first?

Do let me know what you observed on your machine?

In my experience, IE 8 WAS faster than FireFox in most of the cases for browsing speed and load test. I am using Vista SP2 RC. I will soon be sharing the screen recording of what i experienced shortly here.

also, Microsoft seems to have just released a study that validates what i just mentioned. A Microsoft video has also been released to demo the same. The study has detailed steps on how to test the browsers yourself (much detailed than the one detailed above by me).. in the report, out of 25 websites IE was the fastest for 12. FireFox was fastest in only 4 and in remaining cases Chrome was the fastest.

Take my “Naked Browser” challenge now and tell me what you see!

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