Windows Phone 7 devices to have only three main designs?

25th February, 2010 by Adina
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During the latest episode of the Frankly Speaking podcast, the hosts for Microsoft Australia revealed that devices using Windows Phone 7 would have only three main form factors. They also confirmed details of the chassis program much rumoured last year.

As already known, Chassis 1 is limited to full-touchscreen devices using a 1GHz processor or even faster and is the first to reach the shipping target late in 2010.

Chassis 2 devices will be similar to common Windows Mobile phones and will sport a touchscreen and a sliding QWERTY keyboard.

Chassis 3 was not very much detailed but will perhaps involve handsets with fixed-in-place keyboards.

Details of other chassis were not discussed, but Microsoft has claimed that Chassis 1 hardware would require a wide VGA of 800×480 or better display. Other requirements would be 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS.

These policies are in contrast with Microsoft’s behaviour regarding Windows Mobile, where choice of design was considered as positive. Windows Phone 7 is meant to provide a tighter integration between hardware and software and will involve Microsoft in writing and supplying many of the necessary drivers itself. This would significantly speed up development and allow faster firmware updates but would also limit the variety of the hardware. Other vendors, like Apple and Palm, for example, have been given favourable reviews because their mobile operating system interfaces and characteristics are, in most cases, tailored to a limited range of hardware.

Besides the chassis details, other rumours say many of the Xbox-style games that are built using XNA may not work until Windows Phone 7.1. This version is unlikely to appear until 2011. There is no explanation for this rumour but it seems the developer framework for outside applications is not ready.


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