Sorry Microsoft but you lose this battle (in the same way that Google beat UPS in David Platt’s classics Sweden story). Using your mobile to find local information and directions is really useful; I have both Live Search and Google maps installed on my TyTn II.  Live Search has recently added the ability to find your location without a GPS – using triangulation or your IP address I assume.  Google maps has had this for a while.  So imagine this situation:  I live in Kent, UK, both apps find me fairly accurately without using the GPS, which is great.  The TyTn...

We know from Mix 08 that Microsoft are bringing Silverlight to the Nokia S60 as well as for Windows Mobile, but I was surprised to see that RedFiveLabs already have a Net60 framework that provides CF on S60. There have just released version 1.1 which includes: support for Visual Studio 2008 (CF 2.0 Smart Device Projects). the Net60 Launcher tool used to execute .NET executables directly from device. RedFiveLabs.Mobile.dll providing managed APIs for SMS, telephony, audio, GPS & vibration. managed support for OpenGL (suitable for game development). new WinForm controls such...

Todd helpfully re-published the Windows Mobile Silverlight roadmap recently.  It does not make exciting reading.  In amongst news of Impressive Google Android Apps, (and here) a T-Mobile Android phone this year (from HTC) and endless twitter about iPhone and 3G, the road map is hardly going to light any fires.  Here's my take on the Windows Mobile roadmap in general, followed by my hope of a glimmer of light for all us WM developers and users... Windows Mobile 6.1 was just released - really nothing to write home about - threaded SMS is nice but there is not much...

Technorati Tags: Windows Mobile Microsoft have released live search for mobiles which includes live maps - this is a big improvement over the previous development available from Jason Fuller which I blogged about here Download from http://wls.live.com directly from yout device. Ian

Technorati Tags: windows Mobile,mapping TomTom may have had a leading position for sat nav and mapping on mobile devices but I predict things are going to change.  Why?  Google and Microsoft. First the Microsoft Windows Mobile Team (well Jason Fuller to be exact) keep updating the really nice version of Virtual Earth Mobile - http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2006/09/15/757207.aspx  - this does sat images, draggable maps, traffic, gps integration, driving directions and more.  Just a shame they haven't offered more support for this and made it an official release.  It also a little unstable. Now Google have released Google Maps for...

Technorati Tags: windows mobile,GPS As new mobile devices are released with built in GPS we see that the implementation of the GPS Intermediate Driver can very from one to another. A key area is the format for the latitude and longitude that GetGpsPosition returns.  On previous devices this has always been returned in raw NMEA format, but on HTC devices they return decimal degrees (formats ref: http://home.online.no/~sigurdhu/Deg_formats.htm) HTC say that "This is the API recommended by Microsoft" which is fair enough, but I think perhaps the documentation needs to be stronger to make this explicit. (ref: GPSGetPosition:...

Technorati Tags: windows mobile,gps In my previous blog (yes I know it's been a while!) I mentioned that there is a bug in the MSDN GPS sample for windows mobile. Turns out that is not the end of the story. There is a further bug relating to the way the code deals with degrees when the longitude or latitude is -0.xxx which requires a refactoring to sort out.  The refactoring essential needs to make sure the DegreesMinutesSeconds class returns whether the Degrees element is negative.  If anyone wants the code let me know. In addition to...