WinMo 7 is getting leaked and it is doing the obvious: taking a page from the iPhone:

WinMo 7 appears to support a gesture interface that will let mobile consumers flick their fingers to slide through images and applications, zoom in and zoom out, and even shake the cell phone to do things like shuffle music. (Note that these features are from a purported internal Microsoft document from last summer and may not actually find their way into Windows Mobile 7, but we are hoping that they do).

Not everything in WinMo 7 is copied from the iPhone. The shaking bit is new, and when the screen is locked, you will be able to doodle on your cell phone screen. But there is no denying that Microsoft is taking its cues from Apple on the user interface of its mobile operating system. Will history repeat itself with Microsoft running away with the prize here, or will Apple strike back by licensing its mobile operating system to other cell phone manufacturers?

As more phones come out with similar features (e.g. gestures) I hope that common APIs come along so we don’t have to rewrite our applications for everyone.

Resco MobileForms Toolkit 2008 was released today, optimized for .NET Compact Framework 3.5 and featuring a slew of new controls and features:

Bratislava, Slovakia — December 10, 2007 — Resco, a leading provider of advanced developer components and tools for mobile devices, has today released Resco MobileForms Toolkit 2008 optimized for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Compact Framework 3.5.

See the company’s press release for more info.

Simon Judge is attempting to understand how Google Maps Mobile cell ID-based location actually works:

Hence, my best guess at how this all works is…

App sends IMEI and Cellid (if available) to Google
If IMEI is for operator with location service agreement then get position
else if Cellid available then look it up in Google cellid/position database
else tell the user their phone isn’t supported

He also notes that Java ME, in most cases, is unable to reliably retrieve a cell ID.

Richard Monson-Haefel, ex EJB author, current mobile analyst, thinks that Microsoft should love Android.

His reasoning is basically: Android will fragment the Java world.

I disagree. Java on the phone is already fragmented. J2ME isn’t ONE thing, it is broken. As he himself says, Sun is moving on to Java SE on the phone, which makes sense as we have the computing power now. The current batch of top phones are computers, so let’s utilize that power.

Android is hopefully going to open up the entire mobile market. I don’t know if this will help Windows Mobile. In some ways it should (open networks etc). I don’t think that Android is going to cause Java developers to jump over to Microsoft though. They now have a great platform that is going to push Mobile Java forward.

I wouldn’t be too happy Microsoft. Ed Burnette feels the same way too, and put out a rebuttal:

If Mr. Monson-Haefel had done a little research first before making blanket statements like this, he would know that Microsoft .NET Compact Framework is not the same as regular .NET. Compared to the desktop version, the Compact Framework has some things trimmed out and some other things added in that are specific to mobile devices. Sound familiar? Android takes the exact same approach.

There is still one overall “Java platform”, regardless of what the language on top is (Java, JRuby, Groovy, etc.) or the particular flavors of the API (ME, SE, EE, GWT, Android), how the code is compiled and run (JIT, AOT), or even what the bytecodes look like. The Java platform is much bigger than any one hardware platform or vendor.

Android represents an incredibly positive new injection of resources and excitement into the Java, Linux, and open source communities. It’s unfortunate that a respected analyst like Mr. Monson-Haefel fails to recognize this fact.

First we saw the iPhone site. Then we had Blackberry support. Now we have Windows Mobile.

Peter Foot has written up Facebook Development with the .NET Compact Framework which delves into the world of creating a Windows Mobile Facebook view:

In the samples explored in this article we have seen how to use the functionality exposed by the Facebook Developer Toolkit. Although Facebook does not expose the full functionality of the site through their API, they provide a wide range of functions for retrieving information on your friends, groups, events, and photos. We have seen how to take advantage of Windows Mobile APIs to integrate Facebook data with our device Contacts and Calendar applications. Finally we saw how to browse and upload to your online photo albums directly from your mobile device.