Developers Hold Key To Windows Mobile 5.0 Success

With its new Windows Mobile 5.0 platform, unveiled Tuesday, Microsoft is attempting to extend its software hegemony beyond PDAs and into converged portable devices, which combine smart cellular phones with media players. However, if the past is any indication, the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant may have its work cut out for it.

While Microsoft has long held a strong position in the PDA market, with its current Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition software platform, it has fought a long and hard battle to build a presence in the cell phone arena.

"Two years ago, we had our first smartphone design win—Orange in Europe," Microsoft chairman Bill Gates told an audience of developers Tuesday, in his keynote address at the company's Mobile & Embedded DevCon 2005 in Las Vegas. "[Today,] we have 40 different device makers providing devices to 68 different [cellular] operators."

With its new 5.0 offering, Microsoft is hoping it'll beat a quicker path towards next-generation cellphones. Microsoft already has something of a leg up, snaring a major partner in the form of Samsung. The Korean electronics giant is using Windows Mobile 5.0 in its i300 family of smartphones-cum-media-players, which Microsoft demonstrated at its conference. The devices incorporate a small, internal 3.0 GByte hard disk for storing MP3 music and MPEG video files.

To facilitate the handling of such digital content, Window Mobile incorporates the software infrastructure that's becoming de rigueur in multimedia-aware operating systems. "We want to make sure the formats, the digital-rights management, and the play lists work seamlessly," Gates said in his keynote. (In an emerging twist, a number of cellular carriers as well as the Open Mobile Alliance trade group have expressed some reservations about DRM licensing terms.)

Layered alongside are features to handle the e-mail side of the converged-device equation. This includes "portable MSN," which allow users to connect to Microsoft's Hotmail service from their phones and ties into a downsized version of Outlook, which can reside on the devices.

While such additions create a platform that's sure to get a look from Motorola, Qtek, and the other cellphone makers that already use the existing version of Windows Mobile, Microsoft is working hard to attract additional partners. "Microsoft has put in a lot of resources here in the past two years, but they're playing catch-up with Symbian, and there are also more developers out there using Qualcomm's Brew platform," said Rick Doherty, research director of The Envisioneering Group, a Seaford, NY., firm that evaluates mobile devices.

Indeed, Symbian shows no signs of losing ground. The provider of smartphone software to Nokia said Tuesday that worldwide shipments of phones using the Symbian platform totaled 6.75 million in the first quarter of 2005.

Another angle Microsoft is working is to take its case directly to the developers who write the applications that run on Windows Mobile-based smartphones. According to Doherty, Microsoft is working aggressively to get test kits into the hands of developers.

With Windows Mobile 5.0, one potential issue is that the platform that was announced today isn't yet shipping. Officially, Microsoft said the software was released to manufacturing. It will ship sometime in the next couple of months, Jane Gilson, director of Microsoft's Mobile and Embedded Devices division, said in an interview.

However, that shouldn't be an impediment to programmers. "Developers who want to build or test out applications for Windows Mobile can do so using the beta release of Visual Studio 2005," Mike Hall, a technical product manager for Microsoft's embedded group said, in an interview. The integrated development environment includes an ARM-based emulator, which mimics the processor used in the cellphones and PDAs running Windows Mobile. Hall explained that Windows Mobile 5.0 is based on the Windows CE 5.0 operating system, and includes a custom shell along with a custom selection of applications. Among those apps are version of Word and PowerPoint specially tuned for mobile use.

Contrary to expectations in some quarters, the run-time that's used with the new platform isn't the 2.0 release of the .NET Compact Framework, but rather the version 1.0 with Service Pack 3.

In terms of footprint, Hall estimated that the Compact Framework runtime occupies roughly 1.5 Mbytes of ROM, while the rest of the Windows Mobile platform itself takes up an estimated 18 Mbytes.

As for languages, developers can use C#, Visual Basic, C, and C++ to create applications for Windows Mobile using Visual Studio 2005.

Fitting Windows Mobile within Microsoft's broader embedded taxonomy remains confusing for outsiders not intimately familiar with the company's offerings. "Right now we have two core embedded OSes: Windows CE and Windows XP Embedded," explained Hall. "Windows CE and Windows XP Embedded are componentized operating systems. In the case of Windows Mobile, the OS is definitely not componentized."

Windows Mobile is offered in a fixed form because it's properly tuned for the converged smartphone environments at which it's aimed. The two componentized offerings allow developers to fine-tune their environments for the many different types of devices where those OSes will see service. "As an OS developer that's building an embedded system, you don't have to take all the features that are available," Hall explained. "Using platform builder, you can start from the kernel with a 250 kByte image and layer needed features on top of that. It's extremely flexible for embedded developers."