WindowsPhone7.5: How it has been changed to the revolution…

Microsoft released Windows Phone 7.5 smartphone OS at the end of last September and it has been designed to make revolution in smartphone world. Although according to eMarketer, smartphone holds 38% of the mobile users, it is a major competitive area in the business and technology world. In today’s context, people are so much interested about the OS of the smartphone rather than the hardware specifications of it when they buying new smartphone. Therefore, there is a great war between the major mobile OS venders such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. With introducing Windows Phone 7.5, Microsoft is going to make big challenge to the Google Android and Apple iOS.

International Data Corporation (IDC) released its latest data for world’s smartphone operating system market share using the Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. This data express the current market share of smartphone OS and the some forecasts about the future of it. At the end of 2011 Android holds 38.9% of market share while Windows Phone holds 3.8% of it. However in the 2015 Windows Phone will increase market share by 16.5% and Android will increase it only by 4.9%. As you can see in following table Windows Phone is going to keep annual growth of over 82% and this numbers tell us the future revolution of the smartphone OS market that Microsoft going to make. The mango or the Windows Phone 7.5 should be a first step of that and there is no doubt about that Windows will be the top of the mobile platform too in the near future.


It’s very interesting study about how Microsoft prepare for this huge challenge and I’m going to discuss them in the rest of this article with the technology as well as business aspects.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had announced next Windows Phone OS update includes over 500 new cool features before few months to the release of Windows Phone 7.5. As he said, it has come with really new features which have been missed to Google and Apple when design their latest versions of Android and iOS. Tie Messaging with threads, Multitasking and App Suspension, Office and SkyDrive and Visual Voicemail are the some of the really interesting features which are introduced with Windows Phone 7.5.



Tie Messaging with Threads
With mango you can now tie contacts Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts to their address book listings, and so all communications with those contacts via the popular social networking services are available in one central location, along with texts and e-mail messages.

Multitasking and App Suspension
Windows Phone Mango is finally adding some multitasking features, and it looks good. Mango presents background application as scrollable cards that actually show a screenshot of the app as it was when last used. Furthermore, Windows Phone 7 will suspend and instantly resume apps in the background. This is a real improvement for Microsoft as users would previously have to relaunch apps each time.

Office and SkyDrive
In Windows Phone Mango, users will have the option of accessing cloud documents in SkyDrive right from the Office hub. The excellent native Office suite will allow users to edit and synchronize their files on the device.

Visual Voicemail
In Mango, user will have a new column in the Phone app called voicemail where each message is available for listening. Since this is also part of the Windows Phone system, it has a familiar UI that most users will be comfortable with. That’s certainly more than we can say for most of the carrier-specific solutions

Since these features enhance user mobile experience and they make life easy, Window Phone will close to the smartphone customers with 7.5 version of it.



Mobile Application Market has widened while smartphones are becoming so popular. Therefore, it is good idea to look at in developer’s perspective how Microsoft has changed Windows Phone with mango to make things easy for mobile phone application developers. Microsoft released Windows Phone SDK 7.1 to develop application to the Windows Phone 7.5 and it provide new APIs and tools which give access to all the cool features of Windows Phone Mango OS to developers. Multi-targeting and App Compatibility, Multitasking, Fast Application Switching, Live Tiles, Silverlight and XNA Integration, Sensor API and Visual Basic Support are some of new enhancement in Windows Phone SDK. In addition this with mango Microsoft is not only improving the way we merchandise apps within their Marketplace, they are also exposing apps as a part of their customers everyday experiences and they introduced more ways for consumers to find app such as dynamic app search with Bing. These new feature definitely will help to popular mango among developers.

While doing this kind of technical enhancements in Windows Phone OS, Microsoft is making business background to achieve their target. Partnership with Nokia will be the one of major fact that ensures the market growth of Windows Phone and ownership of Skype also will help them to make mango popular. Moreover, three new hardware manufacturers have signed on to build Windows Phone 7.5 devices, including ZTE, Acer and Fujitsu while HTC, Samsung and Dell are also Windows Phone partners. Therefore, these business strategies also will support to Microsoft for making revolution in the smartphone OS market.

Google Chrome Developer Tool

Learning and studding web designing is very easy task in modern context, because thousands of tutorials are available in the World Wide Web and design of any web site is implicitly open source. It is not secret, when we found some beautiful web page, any web designer like to know how they manage HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other technologies to make such an amazing design. If it is the case simply we can right click on the browser and select view source in the menu to access the designing source of the web page, as I used to do. Although source is in front of us, it is not an easy task understand line by line how it works. If page has rich content and hundreds of lines JavaScript, the case will be worse.

However, favorite browser Google chrome has come up with inbuilt feature to address to above problem of developers. This new feature is called developer tool and it allows user to explore CSS design, JavaScript and other resources related to each element of the DOM separately. Only thing you have to do is right click on the element that you want to explore and select Inspect Element from menu. Then browser window will be divided in to two parts horizontally and top part will be allocated for displaying web page while bottom one displays chrome developers tool. Here now you can see HTML code of the above page with the highlighted tag. This highlighted one is tag of the element which you right click to select Inspect Element and you can see that element also has highlighted on the web page. Likewise you can explore any element of the page by using Inspect Element of right click menu.

After open developer tools, you can explore each tag of the HTML document by clicking on it. When you move mouse courser on each tag you can see corresponding element has highlighted on the web page. When you select tag, related CSS rules can be seen one right side pane of developer tools section. These CSS rules also have divided to several groups like Styles, Matched CSS rules and inherited CSS rules from parent tags. At bottom of the pane there is tab called metrics. If you expand this tab you can see CSS box model of the element with the measurements. Therefore, it is very easy to understand what is going on the design.

If you want to study script part of the page, simply click Script tab on the top of the developer tool and then you can see client side script of the page. Although usually at the beginning it is almost mess, you can format it by clicking { } icon on the bottom of the page. This feature is called pretty print and after formatting code by using this it’s very clear and easy to understand unless code is obfuscated.

These are only few features of the chrome developer tool offer to you and I think it is easily find others by yourself.

Introduction to itechPort

I’m Tharaka Wijebandara and itechPort is my technical blog. I’m very interested in exploring new technologies related to computer science and information technology. World Wide Web is the best place which I study these things in practically. Since I learn lot of things through the web, I thought that there should be some way to share my little knowledge and experience with this huge community. The itechPort is emerged for this purpose.
I want to mention two things about itechPort. Frist it is not an English or Sinhalese blog. itechPort supports multiple protocols. Protocol can be changed in post to post and it will depend on the content and target audience of the post.
Other important thing about itechPort is that it is not a simplex communication port and it is duplex one. Therefore, after you reading some post in here, please don’t forget add your comment there. It will help to encourage me and make itechPort to way you like. So thank you for reading my first blog post and hope all of you be with me throughout this journey.