Developing for Windows Mobile 5.0
This week, I attended a MSDN TechTalk: A First Look at Windows Mobile 5.0. Marc Perryman gave a feature packed and enthusiastic presentation. There were two parts. The first covered new devices and development related features in Windows Mobile 5.0 while the second was oriented towards the new features in Visual Studio 2005. The Powerpoint presentations are available online here and here.
The main points of note were …
-
Moving of the persistent store to flash ROM. This ensures that information isn’t lost when the batteries go flat. There are also battery life improvements as a result of this. There’s more detailed information here. Note this is for the Pocket PC, not the Smartphone which already has its store in flash memory.
- Support for a 3G stack and simultaneous use of say Bluetooth and GPRS/3G.
- Additional support for smartphone (two softkeys) style navigation on the Pocket PC.
- 1 Tier security (App signing required).
- The option to have the close button (X) actually close. Wow, it finally happened!
- New database API to replace CEDB (CEDB is deprecated)
- In OS Support for GPS and DRM
- The latest additions to the compact framework and Visual Studio make writing mobile applications unbelievably easy - something Symbian/Nokia would do well in emulating.
One ironic point is that Windows CE devices seem to have gone full circle. Some of the very latest Pocket PC Phone devices include a keyboard - i.e. much like the first ‘handheld’ form factor that was subsequently abandoned. Another interesting point was that network operators asked Microsoft to change the Smartphone key lock to match Nokia devices. Likewise, the application list has to be changed from a list to large icons.
The Powerpoint presentations are available online here and here and contain lots of useful information.