News: “Magneto” Releases to Manufacturing

If you are doing mobile development for Microsoft platforms, then yesterday’s announcement from Microsoft should be a welcome note. Yesterday in Las Vegas, Bill Gates announced that Microsoft Windows Mobiletm 5.0 had been released to manufacturing.

Windows Mobile 5.0, previously codenamed “Magneto”, is a milestone for embedded and phone developers. With Windows Mobile 5.0, Microsoft is providing a number of firsts. In referring As Bill Gates stated in regard to this release, “The software is really at the center” With this release, you can connect up to Outlook and share email and pictures. You can connect up with Excel and Word and do editing. There is PowerPoint capabilities as well as rich support for media including support for digital rights management.

Windows Mobile 5.0 also includes support for persistent memory so that information can be retained even if a battery is depleted. Security features include the addition of FIPS-140-2 certification. Windows Media Player 10 Mobile Is also included withits support for pictures and video. Finally, support for hard drives and USB 2.0 has also been added.

“Whether it is what we’ve done on the PC or now on the phone, it is this partnership with developers that is going to keep us in the lead,” stated Bill Gates. “A big deal in this release is how we make it easy to write applications. There are a lot of new APIs, better tools, so we are reaching out to our partners.”

If the numbers Microsoft has quoted are accurate, then there are over 640,000 developrs and over 18,000 commercial Windows Mobile-based applications available. From this, it seems obvious that developers are looking at mobile development. Since Visual Studio .NET 2003, mobile development has never been easier. To see how easy it is, you can check out the Mobile/PocketPC Development Jump Start.

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