Tapas For All! Windows Phone 7 Has Its Coming Out Party in Spain
Today marked the first day of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, a global conference and trade show for the mobile industry that focuses developers, operators, handset manufacturers and infrastructure vendors on new business and technology opportunities.
Coming on the heels of Apple’s ballyhooed iPad announcement, and the much discussed Nexus One launch, Microsoft finally added an entry into the 2010 smartphone race, with its announcement of the Windows Phone 7 Series. Having personally seen several earlier Windows Mobile 7 concepts at previous MWC shows in Barcelona, I can say the new OS interface looks nothing like them. With ties to the user interface in Zune, thanks to the vision of Corporate VP, Joe Belfiore who moved to the Windows Mobile team about a year ago, the Windows Phone 7 series shows Microsoft can offer a simple touch screen layout that doesn’t require a stylus to use it.
The show has provided the platform for several other important announcements, including a few from Adobe, which has been noticeably disrespected by Apple in its iPhone march to mobile dominance. Aligning with the Android team, Adobe’s "AIR for Android" offering will enable mobile developers to leverage their existing development skills to build Flash and 
AIR-based applications across multiple platforms without learning specialized code. Combined with the newly announced Flash Platform 10.1 developers can not only build mobile applications for Android, but can build apps that run anywhere: desktops, laptops, netbooks and smartphones. Although Windows Phone 7 series will not support this version of Flash at launch, all other major smartphone OS platforms besides Apple, including Android, RIM BlackBerry, Symbian, and Palm's webOS have shown their support.
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