Throwaway here.<p>I would take whatever Brandon or other WP7 dev team managers say or promise with a heavy grain of salt.<p>Recently, I was in discussions with a couple people at Microsoft to swing one of the free developer phones they were offering on Twitter.<p>They speak of giving one away like it's no big deal. So I had some back and forth with them on an app, and they said something like "Ok, get a MVP and we'll see about getting you some goodies". I got the MVP done and sent off emails and haven't heard back from them in weeks. Not even a "no".<p>So yeah, I feel a little bitter about it all. It's not like they owe me anything, but just take whatever Brandon, Ben, and gang say with a great big grain of salt.<p>I see a lot of talk about supporting developers from Microsoft, but not a lot of action.
Say what you will about MS's blunders, but I've always found their developer support and outreach to be top notch.<p>Although they've yet to offer me a free phone.
What for? So these guys can get burned twice instead of once?<p>Sorry for the snark - I like WP7, I think it's a refreshing take on smartphone UI, but adoption is really at a standstill. It's been <i>how long</i> since it launched and I've only ever seen one in the wild that didn't belong to someone affiliated with MSFT.<p>God knows I'd love to have a viable third player in the mobile platform wars, but as it is it just isn't happening.
To be honest, I'm rather interested in trying out a WP7 phone. The problem that I have is the fact that it's a huge barrier to entry to dish out hundreds of dollars just to test out a small device. I'm not in a position to be able to just dish money out like that, and I assume there are many people in the same boat as me. I guess that's the greatest burden to anyone trying to break into this market - everyone questions why they should dish out the same amount of money for x phone, when they could just get an iPhone for approximately the same amount of money - they already know everyone loves the iphone.<p>With that being said, I think Brandon Watson is doing his job extremely well - he is eliminating that barrier to entry and getting hackers using WP7 devices. Perhaps creating evangelists.<p>On a side note, Windows 7 has got me to switch back to a Windows OS, from Debian, that I had been running as my main OS since Vista came out. I'm just one guy, but Microsoft is doing <i>some</i> things right. Maybe they can make WP7 work?
That's neat and I'm glad to see it's so high-touch. I tried writing an app for my phone, but got stymied... by the sign-up/verification process. Tried using DreamSpark (<a href="https://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx</a> ), and unlike the Apple sign-up there's this weird third party verification that you're a real human developer or something and after weeks of trying to figure out how to get them to actually validate me so I could install apps onto my phone, I just gave up.<p>And mind you, I pretty much know what I'm doing. I was on the Visual Studio team for 7 years, I sold > $100k in iPhone apps, and I do work on compilers towards my PhD right now. A poor undergrad might not even be able to get as far as I did...
After seeing this I installed Windows (shocking, I haven't used Windows since Windows 2000) and installed the express SDK to check it out.<p>I have to admit I'm actually liking what's there. While I didn't quite have my webOS apps ready to be published, so I don't really qualify for this I guess, I might have to consider the platform. The UI itself is fresh and much better than what I saw from CE on PocketPCs years ago. Of course, not having an actual phone hurts so maybe I'll wait and see how things evolve with the mango release first; I'm still feeling pretty burnt on investing in webOS hardware.