as I bought the new Xbox Live title “Beards and Beaks” yesterday on my Windows Phone, I found something interesting.
It is the first App/Game which provides additional content via In-App-Download.
The Game provides you a message, that new content is available:
After finished with checking which content is available, you get a message:
With a Click of “Let Me at ‘Em! you will be redirected to the following page: (yes, my Xbox live Account is German )
Interesting thing is, that the content is payable with you Microsoft Points.
So it looks like we probably get free Xbox Live Games in Future. Game contents will be paid with our MS Points. Nice Idea.
Many customers want to buy apps, music etc. also on their Windows Phone with the Points. So let´s see if Microsoft will open up the system to the whole marketplace or to all app developers. This would be another step to compete with the iOS-in-App-purchase-system.
What do you all think about this? Leave a comment, guys!
The Keynote started of with a video about an app for WP7, based on Windows Azure technology.
The demoed how to help the victims of natural catastrophes like the one happened this year with the fatal earthquake and the even more fatal tsunami wave.
Then there was a hymn of words to all the great Microsoft partners.
Sure, it was is a partner conference, but what do we consumers learn from this?
Steve Ballmer entered the stage and was talking about one thing, which has risen in the last few years and will be the number one thing over the next years: The cloud. I don´t want to juggle numbers right now. But the cloud is already used by roundabout 60 % of all partners, so there is still a great potential to use.
Microsoft provides several cloud services itself, like the Office 365 Beta or Windows Azure.
And S. Ballmer motivated Microsoft´s partners to engage those cloud products even more.
As consumers we will get more great services over time. As an “learning” developer for my own it won´t take that much advantage from those services, until I ensure I will earn the money back from my apps – and that is not so easy…
There has been several announcements today, which will be consumer related:
– Windows Phone Mango Update will come this fall – confirmed again by S. Ballmer himself
– Microsoft has soon (with next Windows-Version) the ability to perform very well on small, mid-sized and big-screens
– Bing will not be only a search engine any more. As features an time are growing, it will be a platform which will be opened to developers to let you integrate the services of Bing. There will be Voice Command on PC, on Windows Phone and also on Xbox360.
– Bing will get more social with Facebook and Skype. We will be able to decide and take action, a whole new experience on a “search engine”.
– Bing will integrate new services like event-ticket ordering, parking prices and more
– Live TV on Xbox 360 this Christmas. It is not clear which countries will be supported until now.
– now news on Windows 8, only the already well known video demonstration …
The final message of MS CEO Ballmer clarifies, where the journey will end: One UX over all your devices. This shows also this final imagine from the keynote:
So as I love the tiles on my Windows Phone, I can´t wait to get them to my Xbox and my PC.
I just made a video and some shots of playing around with the Developer-Build of Windows Phone Mango. You´ll find the video on the end of my post.
Let´s start with the lock screen, while playing music. As you can see the resized play controls are on it as well as the artists picture which is shown in the music hub.
Now let´s get funny within the Games Hub. As you can see on the picture and in the video, while playing music your avatar is dancing around.
As I have done this yesterday for the first time, my avatar got a windows phone in his handy and played around. After that, my avatar started dancing.
I tried to recreate the windows phone prop to rest the phone in its hand, but I had no success with it. I will update this post whenever I found the solution.
Ok, let´s head over to the marketplace. On the initial page we have now a dedicated search button. In this build you can search only using this button, the windows phone search key does not work within the marketplace.
The results will be displayed with to pages, apps & games as well as music:
The view in the app page has also changed. There are now 4 pages, details, reviews, screenshots and related. I will dive deeper into this in another blog post.
In the messaging hub you can choose whether you want to type in your message or if you tell the phone the text and it will be converted into your message.
Finally, here is the whole video.
I will post more about the mango features over the next days, including screenshots and videos, so stay tuned for my mango review series…
Because of the page rules on Facebook, I need a minimum of 25 likes to be able to create a username for my page.
So please help me and give me a like as certain services to connect with Facebook are only available with a username.
UPDATE:
I still need a couple of likes so please go to my Facebook page and click the button! I will remove this post from sticky as soon as I got my username.
Thanx for your help in advance and greets to you all.
)
So now Steve Ballmers WPC keynote has finished.
