It had to come and competition is great. We are seeing more of 3rd party application stores for mobile solutions. Freeware Pocket PC has opened up an alternative application store for Windows Phones promising instant free downloads for your Windows Mobile phone.  OpnMarket is compatible with most of the Windows Mobile Professional devices with touch-screens, once installed it lets you browse, download and install FREE applications directly on your device. OpnMarket will use your mobile network connection or a WiFi connection to download software to your phone. It’s simple, instant and FREE  with access to more than 6,700 free windows mobile games, tools and themes.

The installer cab can be downloaded from here.

The day we have been waiting for is finally here. Someone published malware in an appstore, and to no surprise it was published to the Android Marketplace.  Norwegian newspaper Digi.no has written/translated an article form The Register about an phishing application written to hijack your banking account information.

This was bound to happen, and this is whythere is such a strict regime to submit applications into appstores like the Apple AppStore and the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Today’s smartphones are trusted devices and the general public does not yet think of their mobile phone as a device that needs antivirus, firewall and malware detection software. But as long as there are vendor solutions like the Android Marketplace; where there is no quality control and no reviewing of applications except for the user feedback from those who already have been fooled by such applications i think things will get a lot worse before it gets better. Continue Reading

Today was a cool day!

Finally the Windows Phone Developer Community is announced and started. I was attending a developer presentation for Windows Mobile 6.5 and Microsoft Marketplace today and just before we broke for lunch i was called to stage to “tell the world” that on Thursday 3. December 2009 we´ll host the first meeting.

This first meetup will be mostly about getting to know each other, and find out who´s interested in becoming driving forces. It is not to be taken lightly that if this is to have any form of success it needs to have support and contribution from developers.

For the occasion we have set up a meetup.com group to handle “members” and announcement of meeting events, so check it out at http://www.meetup.com/Windows-Phone-Developer-Community/. Continue Reading

On Thursday, October 15. (09:00 – 14:30). Microsoft Norway invites developers to Lysaker for a day of  Windows Mobile 6.5 and Marketplace development information. This is a free seminar aimed at developers. This is not only for those already working with mobile development, but also useful for anyone curious about what this is and how to get started.

The first part of the day will be about about WM 6.5, where Director for Windows Phones Norway, Camilla Viken Teigre gives a demo on the new UI and talks about what’s new and improved in this release.

From Finland Vesa-Matti Paananen will be walking us through Marketplace. What is Marketplace and why create Windows Phone applications. Continue Reading

Loke Uei Tan and John Bruno had a session at Mix09 on Windows Mobile 6.5 if your are interested in having a look at how it works and the services launched with it. They are talking about features, the new UI and also about the Windows Mobile application marketplace.

I am not quite sure, but i think Luke Uei about 30 seconds into the presentation mentioned august 09 as planned release month. I am really looking forward to this release and hope i heard it right.

“Death to the stylus” – It’s also good to see that Microsoft finally has understood that the stylus is a really, really bad usability thing. And that lists and screens are now navigable from your fingertip (the most natural stylus of all). Continue Reading