This is an ad for Telekom Austria (not Telstra Australia) for the Windows Phone 7. Its a pretty slick and shows off a lot of functionality of the OS’s features…

Source http://wmpoweruser.com/new-carrier-ad-for-windows-phone-7-looks-pretty-slick/

I have previously mentioned that an “draft” of this book “Programing Windows Phone 7 Series” by Charles Petzold was available for download. Thankfully Microsoft (MSPress) are now giving away the finished eBook (with the slightly shorter name) in PDF format.

If you are interested in what is involved in programming for Windows Phone the this would be an excellent start as it covers all the basics (and the hard stuff).

For more information go to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2010/10/28/free-ebook-programming-windows-phone-7-by-charles-petzold.aspx

I have been using my HTC Mozart Windows Phone 7 device for a few days now and while the OS is very good (see here) it also has some issues which most notably is the poor battery life of the device.

Update: This could be an issues with having Exchange/Outlook ActiveSync profile configured (even if set to manual sync) as removing the account profile from the phone seems to have improved the battery life. Stay tuned for more…

This is also an issues seen by a few other owners of Windows Phone 7 HTC Mozart devices which leads me to believe that this issue is not isolated to just my device or how I specifically use (or hold) the phone.

Interestingly when you setup Exchange/Outlook email it defaults to have a “arrive now” (a.k.a. push) email sync which basically keeps a 3G connected open and active at all times on the device. This configuration will cause a very large battery drain on any device (iPhone, Blackberry or Android) however as this is the default configuration with Windows Phone it may be the cause of some of these battery life issues. That being said even with push email turned off the battery life still appears to be an issue.

However battery life seems to no be an issues with other non-HTC Mozart devices so this would indicate the issue may be with the device and not the OS.

Interestingly that Windows Phone 7 will show both a WiFi and 3G indicator present at the same time where on iOS device you only ever see one or the other. This makes me wounder if the 3G connection remains active when the device is connected to WiFi thus drawing extra power. Certainly turning off all mobile data connections to the device improves battery life on the device so I do suspect that the power life issue is being cause by a 3G data connection that is some how being kept alive.

This is clearly a 1.0 OS and there are going to be some issues but I hold hope that these issues can be resolved as the phone does support software updates. Until then if you are experiencing issues then for now all I can suggest you make sure you turn off all push email synchronisations as this will be the number one cause of battery life issues with the device.

There has been some confusion (see here and here) recently as to weather the HTC Mozart was in fact going to support the NextG frequencies on the Telstra network. Well I now have a HTC Mozart from Telstra and I can confirm without a doubt that the device does support Next G. As you can see from the image below the device does support 850 and 2100 MHz HSPA which is a requirement for it to support NextG.

On a recent visit to a Telstra T-Life store to see if I could pre-order a Windows Phone 7 handset an the response was that Telstra were only accepting pre-ordered online at https://www.telstra.com.au/windowsphone . Once I registered at this site I would then be sent an email and/or sms when the phone would be available for purchase. When told this I clarified what he was talking about was the “register your interest” and not a pre-order page he also told me he was quite sceptical that Thursday would be the launch date as it could be anything up to a  “couple of weeks”. He also mention that the scheduled “internal Telstra launch” was cancelled no one from “windows” had visited them to tell them when the product would launch. While this was only a single staff member who might not really have known anything it would definitely seem that the Telstra staff members are being kept in the dark about the details of the phone until the last minute.

Does this mean that there are supply issues with handsets for Telstra?

Or could Microsoft (and their phone suppliers) be holding back stock until the last minute to ensure no early leaks of the device?

Either way come launch day I will be camping out at the Telstra T-Life store to buy a HTC Mozart (that will support Next G) so I will keep you up to date more news happens.

Right now the official Windows Phone 7 page from Microsoft have listed the 5 launch handsets for all the networks in Australia. One of the phone that is most notably missing is the HTC HD7 which many people have been hoping would be one of the launch device in Australia.

Image source http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-au/buy/7/default.aspx

However i have just added the “New Phones” (see bottom left above) RSS feed to my Google Reader account and I was shocked to see that the two HTC HD7 entries were added just 4 days ago.

As you can see there are two entries in there that list the HTC HD7 as a Telstra phone.

Interesting to note is that the RSS feed right now does not have the HTC HD7 listed in the raw feed so I am assuming that Google have cached some information in the feed that was accidentally released early.

What I suspect that this means is that HTC HD7 will be shipping very shortly after the release but of course Microsoft and Telstra don’t want to take away from the launch event by they don’t want to

Source RSS http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/components/bbRssGenerator/DevicesRSS.aspx?locale=en-au (via Google Reader)

There has been a lot of confusion recently (see State of confusion: WP7 and carrier selection) about weather the HTC Mozart Windows Phone 7 coming to Telstra would support Next G frequencies. The confusion is coming from multiple web sites from HTC and from Microsoft clearly states that the HTC Mozart  does not support the 850Mhz HSPA (a.k.a. Next G) frequencies (see both below).

Source: http://www.htc.com/www/product/7mozart/specification.html

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-au/buy/7/phones.aspx#detail=1573

However in response to the question from @1800PockerPC Justin from the official @Telstra twitter account has now confirmed that the HTC Mozart will support the Next G frequency (presumably 850mhz HSPA).

As it says on HTC’s web site “please check with your mobile operator” (see below) this probably means that HTC is making both an 850 and 900mhz HSPA version of the phone to be sold by the appropriate carrier.

This should hopefully put to bed some people who were thinking about holding off from purchasing the HTC Mozart (see here ) because it was not a Next G capable phone.

So at then end of the day this will mean that the HTZ Mozart will be able to take advantage of the fastest phone network in Australia meaning much faster download speeds to the device.

(Now if only there was a SpeedTest app for the phone on launch day that would be a great way to confirm.)

The video below is a nice level 200 video recorded at TechEd 2010 Australia showing you a basic intro with develop applications with Silverlight for Windows Phone 7.

Source http://www.msteched.com/2010/Australia/DEV252

Microsoft have now released the full video of the Windows Phone 7 launch event that was held in New York earlier this week. Check it out below…

Jump to about 55 minutes to see the announcement that confirms that copy and paste will be coming as an update in early 2011.

Source Microsoft and AT&T Press Conference on Windows Phone 7

In an Australian and probably world first Telstra will be allow use of Windows Phone 7 devices purchase application for their phones and have the cost of the application be added to their telephone bill.

In an Australian first, we’re introducing new integrated billing for the purchase of mobile applications.

This is very similar to the integrated billing that AT&T (see image below) has been testing as reported by Phone Thurrott on his Windows Phone Secrets blog (here).

This has the obvious benefits of having one simple billing source for everything to do with the phone. However this might also result in Bill Shock for some customers as they may not realise they have been actually being billed for all these apps until the end of the month. This is possibly why the Apps of only up $20 can be put on the bill.

Apps purchased can be charged direct to our customer’s bill and will be available for transactions of up to $20

While this might be very convenient for consumers it is not clear if it will be possible for users block this ability for Business that only want to pay for the phone account and not the app purchases for the phone.

For more information see Telstra: Windows Phone 7 – a new challenger arrives