I know that most of you can’t bring yourself to sit through the hour of power that is now available online, or just can’t stand the hype music that CES keynotes bring (I know I can’t), so I’ve condensed and brought to you all the Windows Phone 7 highlights from Microsoft’s keynote in handy blog post form. Nice of me, eh?
Microsoft are clearly choosing an entertainment spin on Windows Phone 7 at the moment (also reflected by their upcoming Mango update sitting in the “entertainment” code branch), and, as such, the keynote focussed on this aspect, looking heavily toward Xbox Live integration.
The first interesting announcement from Big-B Ballmer is that Fable is coming to Windows Phone 7… in the form of golf. The game will be called Fable Coin Golf, and the neatest feature of it is that all gold earned in the game will be immediately available to your Fable III character on your Xbox 360.
This was shortly followed up by a video showing off some of the games coming soon/available on Windows Phone. The list includes (in order of appearance):
- Rise of Glory
- Full House Poker
- Zombies!!!
- Pac-Man
- Fable Coin Golf
- Halo Waypoint
- Fruit Ninja
- DeBlob Revolution
- Parachute Panic
- Tetris
- Game room: Centipede
- Game room: Shao Lin’s Road
- Game room: Asteroids Deluxe
- Assassin’s Creed
- Monopoly
- Pocket God
- Zombie Attack! 2
- Butterfly
- PES 2011 (Pro Evolution Soccer)
- The Sims 3
- Need for Speed Undercover
- Star Wars: Cantina
They also showed off Avatar Gadgets, which are simple little things that your avatar can do, like flipping a coin.
If you like numbers, Steve also gave us the latest WinPho 7 stats:
- There are currently around 5,500 apps available on the Marketplace
- 100 new apps added every 24 hours
- 22,000 registered developers
- Most customers are downloading a new app every day
- 9/10 Windows Phone 7 customers on AT&T would recommend it to a friend
Finally, Steve B-fresh outlined the update that will automatically be pushed to customers soon. As we mentioned yesterday, the update will bring Copy/Paste support, CDMA support, bug fixes, and “significant” performance improvements when opening and switching apps.
The rest of the demo showed of the 7 best features of Windows Phone 7. We’ve seen them all before, but, for the curious, they were:
- The dedicated camera button and easy sharing of photos
- Interactive lock screen and tiles
- Voice search, with location awareness
- Dedicated search button and Bing integration
- Hubs, including the Office Hub and OneNote support
- Apps, including those from Bank of America, Travelocity, Fandango, Amazon.com
- Xbox Live, where they showed a demo of Fruit Ninja
And, sadly, that’s really it. No big news on new hardware, or any surprise features coming in Mango. I guess we have to wait until MWC for that info.
But don’t take my word for it, you can watch the whole event here.