Nerd wars escalate:

It’s no coincidence that during a week when dozens of malicious Android apps have been pulled from the Android Market, Microsoft is offering five Android malware victims a free Windows Phone 7 phone. The catch? You need to share your rage against Android with the Twitterverse.

Microsoft evangelist Ben Rudolph (@BenThePCGuy) tweeted Monday that he is giving away five Windows Phone 7 devices to those who tweet @BenThePCGuy with the best – and by best, I mean worst – stories of Android malware infection. Include #droidrage in your post.

With around 5 percent of the U.S. mobile market versus Android’s 45 percent market share, Microsoft’s latest antic smacks of David picking at Goliath. They’ve also been giving away WP7 devices throughout the year: this summer WP7 director Brandon Watson famously bet Dilbert creator Scott Adams $1,000 that he’d love WP more than iOS or Android; a month later Watson also offered free Windows Phone development kits and devices to webOS developers. During last month’s BlackBerry outage, Rudolph also gave away 25 Windows Phone devices to disgruntled Bberry users.

Read the rest >>>

Chances are, if you’ve got an iPhone or Android device, you’re probably staying put. Loyalty reigns supreme in the world of smartphones, yes? But just in case you are considering making a switch – in this case, to Windows Phone 7 – you can now give it a test run via Microsoft’s cool new simulator.

Here’s TechCrunch with the details:

The simulator is cute, and definitely a great example of what can be done with some incredibly clever scripting — but I’m not sure that it’s actually helpful, either for Microsoft or the curious user. For a laundry list of reasons, the simulator only scratches the surface of what Windows Phone 7 can do; while you can tap into certain screens (the People hub, the Phone dialer) and kinda-sorta simulate what you’d do there, the vast majority just kind of sit there. You’re really just walking through a series of animated screenshots. For anyone who’s written a line of code, the limitations make sense — but for the user trying to get that full-fledged Windows Phone experience, it could easily come across as broken.

Still, it’s worth checking out if only to admire the scripting work. You can find it at http://bit.ly/vvvU05, or by clicking this direct link from your smartphone. It’ll (sort of) work from your desktop browser as well — but as it’s tailored around swipe gestures and touch input, mouse input tends to choke it up.

Read the rest of the article >>>

Twelve New York City startups are currently experiencing Microsoft’s Mobile Acceleration Week where “hand-picked startups can access hands-on support and training to build compelling apps for the Windows Phone platform,” according to TechCrunch. The startups ultimately have 60 days to push their new Windows app into the marketplace.

Jordan Crook, who wrote the TechCrunch article, choose four apps he’s particularly excited about. All the companies he highlights already have iOS versions of their apps and three of the four also have Android versions. Which leads me to the question of the day …

Seeing as how the companies are working on a set (publicly announced) timeline, does already having one or two versions of an app make it easier or harder to develop and test the new Windows Phone 7 app? Do you rest on your laurels and hope it works? Do you get so distracted by how you did it last time that it’s hard to see what needs to be done differently? Are you willing to change some the look and feel of the “old app” to make it fit the new device? How about the fact that the Microsoft Windows Phone Marketplace only has 40,000 apps versus the six-digit figures in the Apple and Android shops? Does that make you complacent or push you to make an even better app?

Or does none of that matter?

Developers? Testers? What do you think? Of course you should work hard to make each project the very best it can be, but what’s your gut reaction (before your better judgement wins over) to these questions? I’d like to see a lively discussion in the comments so let’s get this going!

And be sure to check out Jordan’s top picks from the NYC Mobile Acceleration Week at TechCrunch.com >>>

After the conclusion of this year’s Apple WWDC conference, Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray released the results of an informal survey he performed among conference attendees who were also iOS developers. In it, he asked them what their plans were for developing on different platforms, including Apple’s own OS X. The results were surprising.

iOS developers love iOS (of course), and as recently as 2008, 50% of them were also OS X developers. But today, that percentage has dropped to 7%, and most iOS developers are now actively developing for other platforms instead (including the iPad). This makes a lot of sense – the skillset for developing a mobile application has become more and more specialized, and the developers who can do that well may not have the skills or interest in developing for a desktop platform.

But the data holds other clues as well. For example, almost half of iOS developers also develop for Android. And even though all the developers think iOS is the best platform for monetization (they were attending WWDC after all), 40% of them thought Android was the platform with the greatest potential for future growth. By the way, that question included iOS as an option as well, meaning that 40% of iOS developers attending WWDC actually thought Android was going to grow faster than iOS.

What other platforms did these developers think would have any chance of growing in the coming years? The only other one that made the list was Windows Phone 7 with 9% of respondents. That’s small, but interesting. Microsoft could have something good on their hands.

More details from Fortune and Macrumors.

With all the attention that Apple and Android get these days, its easy to forget about Windows Phone 7. That is, until the company announces that the latest version (Mango version 7.1) has 500 – count ‘em, 500 – new features.

We’ll discuss the implications of this new device in terms of mobile apps (and how they will be tested) in the coming days. But first, let’s take a look at some of the details of this new product (via TechCrunch mobile):

Another communication upgrade is an adjustment to call history, which integrates voicemail, missed calls, text messages, and any calendar events with regards to that particular contact. Speech-to-text will also offer a completely hands-free experience for texting, which was definitely impressive in the demo.

Mango also upgrades all the different Windows Phone Hubs, most significantly Pictures, Office, and Xbox Live. Mango offers what Microsoft has dubbed people-centric pictures, which employs facial recognition software to quickly tag and share with friends straight from the Pictures app.

The Office experience has also undergone a bit of a revamp. Mango will support Office 365 along with SkyDrive (which offers users 25GB of free storage). Office in Mango brings just about identical functionality to mobile, allowing users to highlight and arrange Excel cells or make changes to a Word document and save without worrying about any garbled information. Xbox Live Hub basically brings all of your gaming app experiences into one place in Mango, offering the friends scores, integrating a cute little avatar, and offering a quick-resume experience during multitasking.

Finally, Mango will include and use Internet Explorer 9, which uses hardware acceleration and supports HTML5 to deliver a quick experience. When tested against the iPhone 4, the BlackBerry Torch, and the Samsung Droid Charge, the Windows Phone running Mango blew the other browsers out of the water, delivering 27 frames per second compared to BlackBerry’s 4 fps and Android’s 10 fps. The iPhone 4 couldn’t get started.

Mango will hit users in the Fall, according to Mr. Lees, but developers can get their hands on the SDK now.

What do you think? Any Mango enthusiasts lurking? Chime in with your thoughts.

Lots of speculation as to what the Microsoft-Skype deal will mean for the Windows Phone 7 operating system. Here’s an excerpt from an article on CNN.com today titled Five things Microsoft may do with Skype:

Improve the Windows Phone

Let’s be honest: Windows Mobile phones aren’t selling like the iPhone or the growing cascade of phones running Google’s Android system.

The Windows Phone 7 system really hasn’t had an answer for the iPhone’s FaceTime app or Google Talk’s newly added video. Now it will, with the best-in-breed video and voice chat app at its disposal.

“It’s pretty obvious today that not everyone is doing video, particularly from their phone,” Ballmer said. “That’s an opportunity where there are a lot of things that could be done.”

Of course, Apple and Android products can already run Skype apps. So it will be interesting to see how that plays out. (Ballmer assured current Skype customers that those platforms will still be supported.)

“Given that Skype has been in use for more than a half-dozen years and has a growing user base, it would be difficult for Microsoft to begin eliminating Skype support for other mobile platforms,” Kevin C. Tofel wrote for tech blog GigaOM.

“But future features and other value-add services could be offered exclusively or first on Windows Phone 7 devices going forward, giving consumers a ‘killer app’ to consider when making a smartphone purchase.”

What do you think?

When I heard the news this morning that Microsoft is buying Skype for $8.5 billion, the first thing I thought of (aside from, “wow, that’s a lot of money”) was the impact this would have on Windows Phone 7. Specifically, the impact this will have on video chat.

Until now, Apple has held a virtually monopoly in the area with its “facetime” application. One has to expect that with the MSFT buyout, Skype on Windows Phone 7 will become a huge draw for new users…right?

Here’s BusinessInsider with some reasons why:

Now that Skype is part of Microsoft, WP7 will get a huge advantage when it comes to the popular VoIP and video chat service.

Imagine integrated Skype calls at no extra cost. And this will easily be WP7′s answer to Apple’s FaceTime or Android’s video chat via Google Talk.

Skype is already on millions of computers, making the network instantly larger than anything FaceTime could hope to achieve. (For now, FaceTime is limited to iDevices and Macs.)

It’ll take a while to implement Skype into Windows Phones, but when it comes to mobile video chat, it looks like Microsoft has a huge advantage over the competition.

Far from partial, but still pretty interesting:

Just off the wire (via Slashgear.com):

Microsoft is adding private beta group support to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, allowing developers to do limited testing of their applications before submitting for full app store inclusion. The incoming functionality was announced at Microsoft’s BizSpark UK, according to Richard Hyndman, and should make testing software for the fledgling OS more straightforward.

The news will be welcomed by developers who have had to use unofficial tools such as ChevronWP7 to sideload applications onto jailbroken handsets in order to conduct broader testing of alpha-stage apps. Last week, Microsoft announced that it had 3,000 applications already in the WP7 Market, and 15,000 developers coding for the platform.

Read the entire article >>>