Windows Phone 7 is considered by many to be the logical successor of Windows Mobile 6.x. However, this is a lot more nuanced than it seems at first sight. Windows Mobile 6.x is an open platform for both consumers and business users. Windows Phone 7 on the other hand is being positioned by Microsoft as a platform for smartphones for the consumer market.
Windows Mobile 6.x is an open platform, which is available for a wide range of mobile devices. As a consequence, it is generally hard to develop an application supported by all of them. Application developers for this platform have complete freedom to use the features of the mobile devices directly, using unmanaged code if applicable. Deployment of applications to this platform is controlled by developers themselves. For now the Windows Mobile 6.x platform is here to stay. Microsoft continues to support this platform for legacy applications and mobile devices (such as the HTC HD2, launched earlier this year). There are still many enterprise and line of business applications in use.
Windows Phone 7 is not an open platform. Microsoft has tight restrictions imposed on hardware specifications of the smartphone itself, such as the requirement for three specific buttons at the bottom of the phone. Secondly, only the Microsoft Silverlight and XNA frameworks are supported to develop applications; unmanaged code is not allowed. The advantage of this is that once an application works on one WP7 smartphone, it is guaranteed to work on all of them. And finally, deployment of applications is only supported via the public Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. Only applications that adhere to the Windows Phone 7 Application Certification Requirements will be certified by Microsoft and can be published in the marketplace. Freedom of speech does not apply here, as Microsoft controls whether content is allowed or not. For example, a picture of an iPhone is not allowed because of the rule: "If an application depicts any mobile or wired telephone, handheld PDA, or any other data and voice communicator, it must be either generic or a Windows Phone device."
The Windows Phone 7 is primarily meant for the consumer, but there is a trent towards a more mixed business and personal life. People want one smartphone to perform both personal and business tasks. But if applications can only be deployed via the public marketplace, how do we deploy business-to-business and business-to-employee applications? Microsoft indicates that private marketplaces will be available in the future, but there are no concrete plans for this at the moment. Until then we may have the following alternatives.
1. publish the B2B or B2E application on the public marketplace anyway.
If the application is useless for anyone not in the business and does no harm whatsoever, it may be no problem to publish it in public. An extra threshold may be to charge a fee for the application. The application still needs to be approved by Microsoft.
2. publish a secure application on the public marketplace.
The same as the previous option, except that the application uses online authentication to gain access to the application and online services.
3. deploy the application using a developer license.
When a developer license is registered for a phone, an application can be installed directly on the phone from a PC. This is actually meant for developing only and not as an alternative deployment channel, but I think it is a possibility for small scale deployment. This bypasses Microsoft certification.
4. use a mobile web client application instead.
As an alternative for a rich smart client application a mobile web client application can be developed, which runs in the browser. However, it is not possible to build rich client applications using the full possiblities of the smartphone this way. At this moment also the Silverlight plug-in is not supported on Windows Phone 7.
Hopefully, private marketplaces for the Windows Phone 7 platform will be supported soon.
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