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>> Ina: I'm Ina Fried with CNET News in San Francisco. I'm here with Charlie Kindle [assumed spelling] who's gonna show us a little bit more about the Windows Phone and also talk about how people will be able to write apps for the phone. So when you guys announced back in, not that long ago, a few weeks ago at Mobile World Congress about Windows Phone Series 7 you said you'd have a little bit more to say later about how people can write programs. Now you're giving us a little taste of what that'll be. So what will the tools be that developers can use to write programs for Windows Phone Series 7?
>> Charlie: Yeah, what we're talking about today is the fact that as we built the developer experience for Windows Phone we built upon the shoulders of some giants and 2 of those giants that we're talking about in detail at MIX in a week and a half are X and A for building games and Silver Light for primarily where you build applications on the phone.
>> Ina: X and A being the tools that developers use today to write games for the XBOX.
>> Charlie: That's right.
>> Ina: And Silver Light being a tool that's primarily thought of as Apple -- I'm sorry -- as Microsoft's Flash killer, something that you use to build web experiences, but really you can use it to write programs for the PC, for the web, for the Mac and now for the Windows Phone.
>> Charlie: That's exactly right and instead of thinking about it as a technology just for web applications what it really excels at is allowing developers to build very beautiful, compelling, interesting applications for end users, and we're bringing that to the Phone the ability to build applications that have, you know, very rich UI's, are fun and interesting.
>> Ina: So X and A and Silver Light, 2 technologies very closely associated with Microsoft but not associated with the past Phone. What does that mean for all the developers that have written applications for Windows Mobile past versions?
>> Charlie: So a lot of the applications that exist today developers will be able to move some of that code forward definitely the skill set that they have that they've invested in dot net will move forward. But the user experience for the Phone is very different. You can see from the videos and what we've shown so far that the user experience that we have on the Phone today is very different and those applications won't fit into that user experience. So the developers have to re-engineer their apps for Windows Phone Series 7.
>> Ina: So maybe you can take us to the Phone and show us what does this mean? What is that experience that you're going for on the Phone? Some people saw the demos at Mobile World Congress but some people probably haven't, so what does it look like on the Phone?
>> Charlie: Well, the first thing is we have the start experience which shows at a glance what's going on here. I can see that I'm supposed to be in San Francisco which is where I'm at. And I can very easily slide that up or go right into an email 'cause that was the last thing I was doing. Here I'm viewing an order update from Amazon.com and you could see how we've made text a real key part of the Phone experience and the ability to have beautiful scrolling and high fidelity typography.
>> Ina: So what does this mean for the Phone itself?
>> Charlie: Well, so the developers can build applications very easily and they can extend the experience of the Phone for consumers. So, for example, on the start menu I have things like My Contacts, My Wife or My Assistant but I also have applications I've built. Here's an example of an app we built in our labs as just a test app. It's a very simple level app. And when I run this app I have the ability -- you can see that, you know, it works like a level and if I rotate it it rotates. This was very trivial for a developer to build as an application, because we brought to bear the power of Silver Light and X and A.
>> Ina: Now, this Phone that you're showing looks a lot like the demos we saw at Mobile World Congress. How specific is Microsoft being in terms of that Phone and why does that matter for developers that Microsoft is being more specific?
>> Charlie: Yeah, it's interesting; you have 2 ends of the spectrum. On one end end users and consumers want personalization; they want the Phone to be their phone. On the other end developers want as large a target as possible without having to test on every single device. And so what we've done with the platform is we've enabled the end users now customization and flexibility both in hardware choices, things like building out the keyboard or not. But we've also through the application platform made it so that there's a very consistent hardware platform the developers know they can count on being available across all Windows Phone phones.
>> Ina: And Xbox Live gaming is a key part of this. Maybe you can show me the Xbox Live experience and what is that you guys are trying to do with gaming?
>> Charlie: Yeah, I can show you a quick glance at it. As you can see on my start menu I've chosen to put the Xbox Live tile on my start menu and it shows my Avatar that I would use on my Xbox right there on the tile and it will actually show achievements and so forth as well. But if I go into that experience I go into the game hub. In here I see the games that I'm playing on my Phone. I'm able to see my gamer score, here it's 0 'cause I haven't actually updated it and I'm able to see my Avatar again, the people I'm playing with. I can do things like invite others to share this game with me. So, for example, I can go in and click on Share and choose to share this game say with someone via messaging Windows Live or email.
>> Ina: And obviously the Phone's you guys are aiming to have these out in time for the holidays. It won't just be the Phones and kind of the built-in applications. Do you expect kind of a full fleet of applications to be ready by the time these phones are ready?
>> Charlie: Yeah, we think the developer register's already really hot for a platform and, as I mentioned earlier, the technologies we're bringing to bear developers already know. And so with what we announce at MIX and we talk about at MIX we think we're in great shape for having a really large catalogue of not just a lot of applications but we think they're gonna be really high-quality, they're gonna be beautiful and I think they're gonna be really compelling for end users.
>> Ina: And obviously some of the details you're still not talking about but we'll learn a lot more at MIX, which is later this month?
>> Charlie: That's right we have 12 sessions, a significant portion of the keynote is dedicated to Windows Phone and we'll encourage people to pay attention to MIX to go if they can go.
>> Ina: Great, thanks Charlie.
>> Charlie: Alright thank you.
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