Microsoft has signed on a third-party, Bsquared, to be the first and currently exclusive distributor for Windows Mobile licenses worldwide. Till now Microsoft has had full control of Windows Mobile licensing to OEMs like HTC, Acer, Samsung, etc who would purchase them to ship with their mobile phones. Now the power is in the hands of Bsquared who will on top of just selling licenses, also provide reference designs, communication stacks, technical support, training, testing, value-added products to the OEM partners. Bsquare currently distributes Windows Embedded licenses in North America and offers system integration services at 10 development centers located in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Taiwan, China and India.

The Good :

• Now microsoft can concentrate on developing the platform and pushing it out to Bsquared. Who will deal with OEMs.
• Microsoft can divert more resources towards product development and thus roll out updates faster.

The Bad :

• Once Microsoft rolls out a new update , it has to go through Bsquare … can anyone else see WM7 getting delayed ?
• How will Bsquare handle the xda-developers ROM scenario .. any thoughts ?

via bsquare.com

The guys from wmpoweruser has put together a great feature comparison chat of the iPhone MobileMe service and the Windows Mobile version called MyPhone.

Watch a short Video of Both Service

Microsoft is hosting a Venture Capital Summit today at Mountain View and wmpoweruser has reported that

According to Pjozefak, a venture capitalist, Steve, like all of us, regret Windows Mobile 7 has not launched yet. In his words “Ballmer says they screwed up with Windows Mobile. Wishes they had already launched WM7. They completely revamped the team.”

The new WM team with 1000 employees might be a solution to fix that problem. Its also reported that Microsoft is giving high importance to Windows Mobile and are calling it their second priority after Windows 7.

Lights out is a fun game, the object of the game is to light up or knock out all the lights in a 5×5 grid. When a square is selected that square and its four immediate neighbors, above, below, and to each side invert. There is no wraparound. The object of the game is to get all the squares black. It will run on Portrait, Landscape on all major resolutions, and is aware if you switch the screen orientation. It has 5×5, 7×7 9×9 and 11×11 grids. The new build supports smartphones too.

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With the introduction of many new smartphones in to the market , smartphone sales grew 27 percent, but the sad news is that Windows Mobile’s share of the smartphone market had dropped 2.7 percent in the second quarter of 2009.

	2Q ‘08	2Q ‘09	Comment
Smartphones sold in	32.3 million	41.0 million	27 % increase over 2Q ‘08
Windows Mobile units	3.87 million	3.81 million	9.3 percent of the smartphone market in 2Q ‘09

In short, smartphones are selling well, but Windows Mobile smartphones are having a hard time catching up with the new boys in town. With Windows Mobile 6.5 devices which should be hitting the shelves soon, and rumors that Windows Mobile 7.0 will come out sometime in the 1st 2010 there is still some hope for Windows Mobile. via arstechnica.com

SmartLyrics is a great new Pocket PC Freeware from lpaso from xda-developers. You can manually search for the lyrics to any song and the best part is it can automatically pull the lyrics for the song you play on windows mobile using Windows Mobile Media Player or in HTC AudioManager. The app uses the www.LyricsPlugin.com services to retrieves the lyrics, so it does require a data connection. It should work with any WM5/6/6.1 machine, with the .NET Framework 2 installed.

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FingerPoint is a new finger friendly application launcher for Windows Mobile.
Change log:
1. Quicker start
2. Less memory used
3. Skinable interface
4. Groups In Favorites
5. Progress bar while caching
6. ExitOnLaunch option (can be configured for every app separately)
7. ExcludeFavoritesFromAll option
8. First VGA skin – needs testing
9. Update information
10. Shortcuts to Control Panel settings
11. Removed sorting in Favorites

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PocketZax is an interpreter for a large number of Interactive Fiction (”adventure game”) titles. It is able to play Z-Machine games, which include all of Infocom’s classic games, and also an enormous number of games that have been created more recently using Graham Nelson’s excellent Inform application.

PocketZax should provide you with hours of entertainment — make sure you take a look at the Interactive Fiction Archive Games section for hundreds of games to play on PocketZax.

PocketZax should support all V1 to V5, V7 and V8 games, including the original Infocom titles (though I’ve not tested it on a huge range of different titles so please let me know if you encounter any problems).

The Z-Machine engine used by PocketZax (ZaxCS) is based entirely upon the “Zax” interpreter written by Matt Kimmel , ZaxCS is a port of Matt’s original version into C#.

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Numpty Physics is a Physics game for Windows Mobile. the aim is to get the red ball towards the star. Just use the stylus to create new objects that you can fling around using the game’s built-in physics engine. Unfortunately no button that freezes the animation exist in this version.

UP – previous level
DOWN – Next level
RIGHT – restart animation
LEFT – seems to exit the game
centre button – nothing happens

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Pocket e-Sword i s a Windows Mobile freeware Bible application. Its a must have for all Christian Windows Mobile users. The layout is pretty straight forward. Tabs give you quick access to the different resource types, and a combobox lets you choose the specific title you want. The Bible view has a Scripture reference button to allow you to quickly navigate to any location in the Bible.

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