One year ago, LG could best be described as “enthusiastically WM” – their CEO announced intentions that most of their future smartphones would be based on Windows Mobile – and not the then-up-and-coming Android.

Mobile Business Briefing now reports the following:

LG, the world’s third-largest handset vendor, yesterday launched a smartphone based on Google’s Android operating system in South Korea, its home market. The model LG-KH5200, which will be sold by the country’s second-largest mobile operator KT, will compete against Motorola’s Android-based smartphone MOTOROI launched earlier this year through top carrier SK Telecom. LG plans to boost its smartphone offerings with some 20 models this year, half of which will be based on Android.

Is it just me, or isn’t Microsoft’s game plan as great as they thought it was? Hmm…

The demo units used by Microsoft employees to show off Windows Phone 7 all had a 800×480 screen – which can be considered the current pinnacle of high-definition screens for mobile devices. However, these screens also are expensive…

Shawn Hargreaves now disclosed further information which should be interesting to both users and developers:

The phone features an image scaler which allows games to render to any size backbuffer they like, and have it automatically stretched to fill the display, with black bars along the edges if the backbuffer and display have different aspect ratios (an idea that will be familiar to Xbox developers). This scaling is handled by dedicated hardware, so does not consume any GPU resources, and it uses a high quality image filter that gives much better results than bilinear filtering like you would get if you did this yourself on the GPU. The scaler is important for two reasons:

* At launch, all phones will have a 480×800 (WVGA) display resolution, but we will add 320×480 (HVGA) in a future update. Of course you can detect the native resolution and program your game to adapt to this if you want, but the scaler allows games to pick just one resolution, always render at that fixed size, and still run correctly on phones with different native screen sizes. For bonus points, we automatically scale touch input to match your chosen resolution.

* 480×800 is a lot of pixels! This is a great resolution for displaying text, browsing the web, etc, but it can be a challenge for intensive 3D games to render so much data at a good framerate. To boost performance, some games may prefer to render at a lower resolution, then scale up to fill the display.

Not much to add here…

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 announcement split the tech world into two parts: one half went bonkers, and the other half was stunned. Yours truly remains a skeptic – expecially when reading interview replies like the one below.

JoyStiq asked a Microsoft employee whether games for Windows Phone 7 would be able to benefit from specific hardware features of individual phones. The answer was:

What you’ll see is that we really want to drive consistency. What we’re doing is trying to make sure people try and focus on what’s guaranteed to be there. We certainly want to see an ecosystem where someone can say “hey, that’s a really cool game, I’d really like to get that,” and no matter what type of Windows Phone 7 Series device I have, I can have that same experience. That’s a very core value.

For me, this is a very bad sign – it means that the Windows Mobile ecosystem as we know it is all but dead. From now on, its specific hardware features only – device diversity is dead…

When set up against the job of making an ad for a motor saw manufacturer, most of us will probably think of lightly-clad girls, muscular men and the jungle.

According to DirectDaily, the folks at the chainsaw manufacturer STIHL went a different way. They created a self-updating paper calendar, which is pictured below:

Not much to add here…

Microsoft’s approach to software development is pretty unique – more than one book has been written on the topic.

Technologizer now spoke with the project manager behind the original version of Windows:

…

At that point Windows was no longer considered the company’s star project, as it had become a bit of an embarrassment. Even internally there were doubts among some in the company that Windows would ever ship. Also, because Ballmer had already burned though four product managers to try to get there–people who now had been either reassigned or were no longer at Microsoft–the product was developing a reputation for career death.

…

Further information can be had at the URL below:
http://technologizer.com/2010/03/08/the-secret-origin-of-windows/

Many consider Windows Phone 7 to be some sort of “larger Zune”, rather than a true successor to the business OS Windows Mobile used to be. A recent statement by a Microsoft employee who claimed that XNA 4 will not support the HD raised a few heads.

CNet now got a clarification:

… he emphasized that Windows Phone 7 Series will indeed include the equivalent of a Zune HD in every phone, he also said that Microsoft is “all systems go” on Zune HD production in the U.S. The company still plans to release a Zune HD firmware update this spring with some interesting new features, … Microsoft won’t encourage amateur developers to make games for the Zune HD, but it might port (or allow developers to port) some popular Windows Phone 7 games back to the Zune HD.

This is obvious to some extent – why not continue to sell the HD if it makes money? However, I don’t think that the device will be around for much longer (and/ or that new hardware will be released) lest it irritates partners too much…

What do you think?

Google’s Android operating system can be considered one of the largest threats to Windows Mobile currently in existence. HTC is “moving” to it, and Motorola has chosen to use it too.

Their latest press release thus left me surprised:

- Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT) today announced a global alliance with Microsoft Corp. (NYSE: MSFT) to deploy Bing services on Motorola devices powered by Android. This new offering, launching in China on smartphones in Q1, will provide consumers a choice when using search and map functions on their Android-based devices.

With this collaboration, consumers will enjoy a pre-loaded Bing bookmark on their mobile browser and an enhanced search widget with Bing integration.

…

Even though Motorola has announced plans to resume its Windows Phone business in the near future using Windows Phone 7, I am not really sure why Microsoft allows them to pull this off.

Ideas, anyone?

Microsoft’s Windows Mobile once was the number one gaming platform – in a time, when the average Palm had a 20MhZ CPU, Compaq offered 200MhZ.

Independent game developers used this hardware potential to their benefit, and created games – until J2ME games and the iPhone took over. With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft seems to “remember its past”.

The operating system was always advertised as being “extra gamer friendly”. In order to prove that, Microsoft provided Engadget with a few images of a 3D game running on a Windows Phone 7 device. One shot is below:

Further information can be had at the URL below:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/09/microsoft-shows-off-xna-games-running-on-windows-phone-full-3d/

Long-term followers of this web site know that I love new screen technologies – especially if they are of the OLED variety. Samsung claims to have one step further with its Super AMOLED…but has not disclosed too much so far.

Don’t ask me where erikaustria1974 got the tone-less video below – it seems to be a Samsung-internal video showing the benefits of Super AMOLED:

Not much to add here…

The iPhone’s lack of stylus was praised when the unit first came out – unfortunately, having no stylus makes using the unit with gloves difficult.

Koreans discovered that a popular type of snack sausage could be used as stylus – and an innovative vendor has now capitalized on their findings. His “sausage” is non-edible, but can be used as a stylus for long times without fear of “degeneration”:

Those of you who feel like taking a stab can do so for the acceptable price of 1 USD – further information is at the URL below:
http://www.casecrown.com/iphone/accessories/iphone-1g-3g-3gs-sausage-screen-stylus