Microsoft has released the Windows Phone 7.1 Beta tools including all the hyped “mango” goodness targeting WP 7.0 and the 7.1 beta release..
Phones running the new software, will let users search for restaurants and businesses in their immediate area, perform voice-based Web searches, identify music playing in their surroundings, and switch back and forth between applications.The release will also include a fully HTML 5 compatible web browser.
Developers interested in reviewing this beta should install it on a secondary machine. You should continue to use existing Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.0 tools to develop and test Windows Phone apps that target Marketplace customers running Windows Phone OS 7.0. This beta represents significant progress with windows phone 7 OS..
Get it from the Microsoft Download Center Today:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=77586864-ab15-40e1-bc38-713a95a56a05&displaylang=en
Internet Explorer 9 Mobile Emulator Performance Concerns
We are seeing not only the importance of HTML 5 but HTML 5 on mobile browsers. Microsoft seems to have great HTML 5 compatibility, but can we use the emulator developer tools to truly guide our per-platform performance tweaking that we normally still have to do on a per device basis ?
Some screen shots from the Windows Phone Emulator running the IE 9 (HTML 5) web browser.. Note the emulator’s performance in the Fishtank shots versus realtime on the same machine. Not sure I could really use this emulator for performance testing of display updating. The machine tested on is a core 2 device with an NVIDIA 9200M gpu..
1 frame per second with one fish (OUCH!) and this is a beta quality emulator ?
A little better (but not much) with 1000 fish running on the emulator (now granted it is emulator) but check this demo out, outside of the emulator..
We really can’t complain about performance because it is an emulator (virtual machine) but it is GPU assisted and when I am tweaking for performance and attempting to get an over all baseline performance estimate, with this emulator it is difficult, because the performance can vary widely between Silverlight based phone apps, XNA applications, and now Mobile HTML 5 web browser apps as the ability to performance test web based HTML 5 apps on this mobile web browser becomes more and more important..
Can Microsoft improve on the emulator performance ? Only time will tell..