WPF Phone

I can already hear the iPhone owners: "Windows Phone 7 UI is a copy of the iPhone UI". I will understand this, but it's only looking at the UI from the perspective of an iPhone user.

I've not used an iPhone, primarily because I know that however good the OS looks (and it does look good), it doesn't offer the features I want (neither does Windows Phone 7, as mentioned many times before). However I was just browsing through a few screenshots of apps on the iTunes web pages and one thing repeatedly kept hitting me: "These apps look like they were written in WPF!"

WPF has been around since (AFAICR) the release of Vista, and at that time, as far as I was aware, Microsoft weren't trying to ape the iPhone UI to the desktop (although I dare say some inspiration was drawn from there, as is the nature with these things, although reading some of the documentation and tutorials on WPF I would say they were after a version of HTML for creating Windows clients originally).

WPF is the brother to Silverlight (with the alleged intention apparently to end up with a single technology at some point)

And  of course Windows Phone 7 is based on Silverlight and XNA.

I can see where this is going...

On an aside, several years ago there were hot rumours of Microsoft going into competition with the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS. I can't think of any device they are scheduled to launch in the fall that may be doing this...

It's been argued before, but finally I can see mobile killing the likes of the PSP and DS. Perhaps it's a shame NGage never caught on after all.