I recently spoke to devs who are in the microsoft program. They say Windows Mobile 7 launch is premature. The documentation is not complete and many things are not at all described and have to be asked to a marketing person, who asks a tech guy, etc. Furthermore, Microsoft is signing contracts stipulating 1 to 1 ports of games and apps (they are paying the top devs to do this). However, some things are impossible to port. For example, you cannot show an embedded browser in some games in WM7, but facebook integration needs an integrated browser to display their authentification stuff.
So it's all really problematic and difficult.
The licensing fees for WM7 are also the highest in the market for handset developers (not sure about this, someone just told me).
Also, iPhone ports between the two is very difficult, because you need to translate Objective C to C#, then translate OpenGL to DX. You may as well just rewrite the game. Porting process is taking about half the time to develop the original game, according to my dude.
They say Windows Mobile 7 launch is premature. The documentation is not complete and many things are not at all described and have to be asked to a marketing person, who asks a tech guy, etc
This is not unusual when working on a new or unreleased platform. I was the lead engineer on a PSP launch title and parts of the docs were still in Japanese, we had both windows & Linux tool chains that were buggy in different ways, and getting answers to most questions involved asking a guy in the US who would have it translated and sent on to Japan. Oh and we had one devkit between every two engineers for most of the project :)
PS3 was better, but still nothing you would describe as ideal.
Working on the first wave of software for a platform can be fantastically exciting and very rewarding, but on the flip side you're pretty much guaranteed to run into bugs and situations that no one foresaw.
So it's all really problematic and difficult.
The licensing fees for WM7 are also the highest in the market for handset developers (not sure about this, someone just told me).
Also, iPhone ports between the two is very difficult, because you need to translate Objective C to C#, then translate OpenGL to DX. You may as well just rewrite the game. Porting process is taking about half the time to develop the original game, according to my dude.