MIX 2010 Day 1 Recap: Got Windows Phone 7 Series?
Greetings Readers!
I'm sure that by now, most of you have heard at least something that has come out of Microsoft's MIX 2010 today, probably from our keynote live blog, but there is a lot of newsworthy information that hasn't been talked about too much so I am going to share a bit of a recap of all of the juicy information I found out today.
The day started off with the keynote which was quite interesting or at least it was if you have the least bit of interest in Windows Phone 7 Series. There were plenty of demos on how to write applications to ready to demo applications from Seesmic and even Netflix. I wasn't too shocked to see applications from Seesmic or Shazam or anything but the Netflix steaming app really surprised me considering there is still no Netflix app for the iPhone.
The experience on the phone seems to be very smooth and is obviously very dependent on having a network to connect to. Between notifications and the fact that the phone pulls most of its information from the cloud, if you have no network connection, the phone seems pretty crippled as to what it can do. I'm not a huge cloud fan for this reason but I will hold off until everything is ready to ship to say just how bad of an idea this is.
The capabilities of the phone are very impressive. Thanks to the high, minimum hardware specs such as 256MB of ram, 8GB flash drive, 5MP camera, DirectX 9 acceleration and much more. They demonstrated the whole idea of playing a 3D Xbox Live arcade game on the phone, Windows and the 360. I wasn't as impressed by that since XNA which the phone uses has been doing this for a while, but I was impressed by the power of the phone. The game it was playing looked to be as good if not better a quality as many of my PSP games. In the mobile gaming market, it has the potential to be a major player. That said, I am slight annoyed that they aren't saying what graphics chip the phone is using although I suspect that it is nVidia's Tegra 2.
There was also some interesting talk in terms of what you can do for business models. We found out that ads can show up over your content like a pop-up ad which is extremely annoying. We were being shown an AP News app when suddenly the bottom 1/3 or so of the screen had a Ford Focus driving on it for several seconds. As a hater of ads that get in the way of the content and experience, this makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Luckily, there are more ways to monetize your app but not as many as there should be. You will be able to sell apps as normal and even let people try apps before they buy them which is awesome. One of the things that I noticed that was not mentioned, but I love is the fact that at least with the apps, there are no Microsoft points, just an actual dollar amount. Whether that is the case with the Zune Marketplace on the phone, I have yet to find that out but I am glad to see that they appear to be moving away from the whole points nonsense. One way you won't be able to monetize your app, at least initially, is with downloadable content. At launch, there will be no in-app purchases. If you want to have downloadable for your games or whatever, you will want to hold off a while. The last thing to note about purchases is that you can use a credit card or whatever or you can have it billed to your phone bill.
After they keynote and intro to Windows Phone 7 Series, there wasn't too much of note although I did have some great conversations with some people from Internet Explorer, XNA and others. I will share those conversations on the next Global Geek News Podcast because I am too tired to write separate posts for those.
I hope to have the chance to record the podcast tomorrow since I didn't have time today and there is a huge surprise for you all with the new show as the new Intro is finally done and ready to go! I can't wait to hear what you guys think about it. Anyway, stay tuned for the live blog of day two's keynote where we will learn about IE 9 and who knows what else. More MIX 2010 coverage to come!
Microsoft’s CES Keynote was a major snooze
Greetings Readers!
As I am sure many of you are aware, last night was Microsoft's CES 2010 keynote and if you watched it, you know that the most exciting thing that came out of the keynote was the power failure that delayed it close to 30 minutes (We live blogged it here). As I stated last night, I would give my thoughts, both good and bad right here (Disclosure: I am a Microsoft Student Insider), so here we go.
I was rather surprised at the lack of announcements coming out of the keynote compared to years past. For those hoping for a big announcement regarding the rumored new features behind Ford's Sync, you are out of luck. Those are apparently being saved until Ford's keynote. Hoping for a major announcement about the Zune HD? Nope, nothing here either. Windows 8? Wishful thinking. A portable version of the Xbox? This will remain every gamers fantasy. What was announced? Ballmer really didn't announce much. He gave some lines about Windows 7 being the fastest selling OS of all time and some analyst speculation that PC sales will increase considerably this year but I don't really call those announcements. Steve announced that the HTC HD 2 running Windows Mobile will be coming to T-mobile but I am not sure anybody cares since we are talking Windows Mobile after all and T-mobile doesn't help either. Steve said they would talk more about the future of Windows Mobile at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona next month. Ballmer did show off some prototype "Slate PCs" that will hopefully combat anything Apple announces later this month. The one he really demonstrated was an HP prototype that was running Windows 7 and the Kindle PC software to demonstrate how good of an e-book reader it could be and it looked to be about the same size as the Kindle 2. Sounds nice and I will definitely buy one, but if you are going to try to compete with Apple, you need to show something that will come out a little sooner rather than some prototype. Wait, you really wanted to know what was announced? Ok.
As far as REAL announcements go, there are a couple fairly minor announcements. Bing is now going to be the default home page and search engine for all HP computers. Excited yet? They also demonstrated what a Cable Card and a pc in your tv could do and said that with it, you can record 4 HD channels simultaneously which was probably the most impressive thing from they keynote. They talked a bit about Media Room and some partnership with AT&T's U-verse that I still don't understand and finally they had a couple interesting Xbox announcements. Besides all of the interesting number like units sold and games sold, Robby Bach announced that Project Natal will ship as an attachment to existing Xbox 360 systems in time for Christmas 2010. No price although I would expect that around E3. There was also no demo which was kind of disappointing. They also teased a new Halo game only to have it turn out to be a trailer for Halo Reach which was announced back at E3. I was rather disappointed but the audience seemed to love it since they could see the trailer and everybody watching the stream could not. The big Xbox 360 announcement was Game Room.
What is Game Room? Game Room seems to be a virtual space similar to the PS3's Home where you can run around a giant arcade as your avatar and buy and play old arcade games that look like the arcade units you would spend tons of quarters on in years gone by. Over 1000 games are planned for the next year that will be released in weekly batches that you will have to purchase. The coolest part is that this will be not only for the Xbox 360 but for PCs too! How much are these games going to cost you ask? If you want to play an arcade game on both platforms, you will be paying 400 Microsoft points aka $5. To get it on one platform, it is 240 points or $3. If you really want the old school experience, you can pay 40 points or $.50 and get two quarters worth of playing time on the old machines. The games can be played with other people, in 1080p and there are cross-platform leaderboards and achievements. This is coming in the Spring update to Xbox Live. Personally, I am really looking forward to this because lately I have had the urge to start buying old arcade machines and turning my basement into a small arcade but now I will be able to do it virtually instead of having to completely redo the basement. This was the only real announcement with any cool factor to it other than the HD recording. If you would like to see the demo that the people watching the live stream couldn't watch, you can check it out here.
That was pretty much about it. It was a very boring keynote and ended kind of out of nowhere. It certainly doesn't make me super excited about Microsoft this year but hopefully that will change. What did you think about the Microsoft CES 2010 keynote? Good? Bad? Boring? Exciting? Let us know!
For Android to thrive, Google must do more
For months, I have been toying around with the Android SDK. There are a number of reasons that I have decided to being creating Android applications that range from the potential money I could make to the fact that it is an open source OS and I don't have the money or time to invest in a Mac and learning Obj-C just so I can make iPhone apps. Along the way, I have come to realize just why android isn't an iPhone killer or at least not at this stage in the game and that reason is Google.
I will admit that for the most part, I am a big Google fan (not a fanboy), I believe that they aren't doing what they could be to really help their products, specifically, Android. As I am sure you are aware by this point, Android is Google's mobile operating system. While it certainly has its its drawbacks, I am sticking to my belief that in the end, it will wipe the floor with the iPhone OS primarily because it is open and designed to work on many different phones. There are supposed to be at least 20 android phones available by the end of this year alone (the main reason I think it will eventually beat the iPhone). Unfortunately, the biggest obstacle to achieving this goal is android's creators, Google.
There are a couple of big obstacles that Google is creating that aren't making things better for them. The main obstacle is applications. There are some amazing applications for android that are far and above many iPhone applications but there is a big problem, there aren't very many of them. Last I heard, the iPhone had over 50,000 apps and growing rapidly. How many apps does Android have? The last I heard was around 5000. Unfortunately, I believe that is Google's fault. Why is that Google's fault? One word: documentation.
In my months of playing with the Android SDK, I have discovered the documentation in many places are terrible! In many places, there are examples using code that has long since been removed from the SDK, other lines of code that just don't work and even some that are not necessary. This is especially true if you want to do anything with multimedia. Want to record audio? You are in for many hours of headaches if you are going by the examples in the android dev guide (trust me on this). The bottom line is that if Google expects to have more applications and be a real competitor for the iPhone, it needs to do all it can for developers and that includes keeping documentation up to date.
The one other big issues I have is with advertising. It wasn't until recently that Google finally announced the ability to put ads in mobile applications and even that is reserved for a select few that meet the various requirements including 100,000 impressions. Having such a small group of people able to take advantage of it is bad, especially for those that want ad supported applications so they can give away their applications. Free applications attract far more customers than paid ones, but developers still need to make money for their time and effort. Without advertising, this won't happen like it should. Considering the fact that Google is in the ad business, you would think that they would have had this out and ready to go the second android launched. Clearly, Google lacks focus and dedication to Android.
If Google became truly focused and dedicated to Android, I think that within a year, it could be ahead of the iPhone, but until that happens, the only advantage they have is the ability to put their OS on many phones. Wake up Google!
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