Movie Miguel's Offical Blog: Microsoft announces Windows Phone 7 Series dev partners: Sling, Pandora, NetFlix, Foursquare and more

3.15.2010

Microsoft announces Windows Phone 7 Series dev partners: Sling, Pandora, NetFlix, Foursquare and more

By Nilay Patel

posted Mar 15th 2010 1:34PM

Breaking News

Microsoft just dropped its first press release of MIX 10 on us, and in addition to detailing the Sliverlight and XNA-based Windows Phone 7 Series development situation, we've also got a list of launch software partners and some screenshots of apps in action. There's some heavy hitters here, and everything from games to enterprise apps are represented -- notables include the Associated Press, Citrix, EA Mobile, Foursquare, Namco, Pangeonce, Pandora, Seesmic, Shazam, and Sling. We're slated to see some demos of these in action, we'll let you know how things look. Full list after the break.

Updating with impressions after the break!

Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series apps

Windows Phone 7 Series app demos

So we just saw the Netflix app, which was a bit of an expected surprise, and now we're checking out Foursquare. All of these apps feature the "app bar" at the bottom of the screen, which places options in the same place in every app. Foursquare is pretty much Foursquare, only integrated with Bing maps. Next up was Shazam, which works.. exactly like Shazam, only with the slick WP7S Metro UI.

Now we're seeing the MLS app, which is going to be the main demo for push notifications. MLS will have live stats, real time scores, and live clips of games in progress. You can set up notifications within app for things like your favorite team scoring a goal or winning a match, and the notification pops down from the top of the screen. You can then click on the notification and it'll switch you back to the MLS app. Yeah, it's a lot like the iPhone's model with app-to-app switching -- we'll have to see how this works with multiple apps open.

Next up is an app called Marionette, which lets you skin an avatar and dress it -- ha, they're using Steve Ballmer! You can also put in audio clips and animate the mouth, Terence and Philip-style -- they sped up Ballmer saying "developers." Pretty funny stuff.

Now we're seeing Seesmic, which is the same Silverlight code that runs on Windows and the Mac. Again, it's very similar to what you'd expect, just wrapped up in the WP7S UI.

After a quick demo of a custom app that fired a t-shirt cannon, Major Nelson has taken the stage to demo some games. He played with Goo Splat for a second -- it was ported over from the Zune HD -- before opening Battle Punks to show XBL integration. (He called it a "virtual button masher" -- ha!) Now he's doing the demo we saw last week of the same game running on a PC, the 360, and then the phone.