The highlight of the keynote came a little over 15 minutes into the presentation with the unveiling of Windows Mobile 5.0. The key features are:

• Market Dynamics
• Standards
• Moore’s Law
• Content & Entertainment
• Networking Protocols
• Hardware & Software Advances

A key improvement sited by Gates was the incorporation of speech recognition. He also talked about the ability to incorporate greater media and Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Gates said that Microsoft was very keen on productivity, citing Microsoft Office as the pinnacle of productivity software. He said that the next big release of Office would happen next year. In the meantime, they have added the ability to edit Excel and Powerpoint documents in Windows Mobile 5.0, as well as strong integration with MSN services such as Hotmail and MSN Messenger. An example Gates gave was the ability to take an email on the phone and associate it with a photo on the phone – they have given a lot of emphasis to allowing media on mobile devices to be easily accessed from within their built-in applications.

Gates said that, in the future, people’s media devices (which the rest of the world refer to as MP3 players – but this isn’t Microsoft’s standard, of course) would be their phones. For this reason, Microsoft has focused a lot of attention on getting seamless DRM working in phone form factors.

A demonstration was given by a perhaps overly-enthusiastic Ford Davidson, Product Manager in the Mobile & Embedded Devices division. A company called Sentient had created an application called Rundo which uses the GPS API in Windows Mobile 5.0 to share GPS information with multiple applications. This allows runners to get lots of information about their runs, such as number of calories burnt, altitudes, etc. They can also associate photos taken on various runs with the logs for those runs. The entire application was written using managed code.

In Outlook, they have added soft keys and priority markers. The new version of Powerpoint Mobile allows Powerpoint slide decks to be played on mobile devices, including animations. They said Bill Gate’s phone number is 425-882-8080, which was interesting.

The Samsung i300 was held up as a key implementor of their new media standards. The device runs Windows Media Player 10, which allows song lists to be quickly filtered, album art, and star ratings. The currently playing song can be accessed from any application via a managed API.

Gates said that they have done a lot of work to allow diverse hardware to be supported. They support 802.11 and many other protocols. They support landscape and portrait layouts. They have dialing API’s. Finally, they support multiple storage mechanisms. For device manufacturers, they have added a lot of device updating API’s.

Mike Hall, Technical Product Manager from the Mobile & Embedded Devices division did another demo at this point. Hall showed a Component Designer tool which would allow an OEM to customize a Windows Embedded device that they were designing – such as a Kiosk. He demonstrated the creation of a kiosk capable of customizing a Windows Mobile 5.0 device connected to it with the custom theme of the user’s choice.

He demonstrated a feature called Hibernate Once Resume Many (HORM) by unplugging the kiosk. When plugged back in, the kiosk came back up in less than a second, which immediately appealed to folks familiar with devices losing power in settings such as POS.

The Today screen on the Pocket PC now has support for full video. On the phone in the demonstration, for example, there was a video of Halo 2 playing on the Today screen. The soft buttons for the phone and ring tones (both standard and SMS) were also customized.

The final – and perhaps most important, from out perspective – point was the importance of a rich development platform to Microsoft in creating any new platform. Gates indicated that Visual Studio 2005 would RTM this summer. He specifically cited SQL Server Mobile Edition 2005, improved emulators, and the “Compact .NET Framework” (sic) – specifically its increased support for COM Interop, state notification, and improved designers. He indicated that there should not be any need to change any code created on Beta 2 once Visual Studio 2005 is Released to Manufacturing.

Neil Enns, Lead Program Manager for Visual Studio, demonstrated actually developing using Visual Studio 2005. The announcement that C++ is a part of Visual Studio 2005 – which has been known for many months now – raised a round of applause from the audience. Neil created an application using Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Mobile 2005 that would allow a user to find a restaurant for dinner, including calling the restaurant to make a reservation. It took about 10 minutes to create the entire application.

Cool new development features demonstrated included:

• Code Snippets – collections of pre-built code that can be added to applications from Visual Studio 2005
  
• Data Explorer – the ability to graphically determine which GUI components are used to represent various data fields
  
• Date Time Picker – audience applause were generated by the addition of an easy way to choose dates from custom NETCF applications
  
• Camera Captures – new Windows Mobile 5.0 API’s to standardize the programming interface for taking pictures
  
• Outlook Mobile Integration – the revelation that managed wrappers for Outlook Mobile would finally be included in Windows Mobile 5.0 resulted in a very big round of applause

Seth Dempsey, Lead Developer on the Compact Framework and a name known to many of us in the mobile space, continued the demonstration. Seth built a P2P game live on stage. Seth focused mainly on improvements to the GUI options available in the Compact Framework. Some of the features he covered include:

• User Controls support
• Grid lines on control addition
• Docking and anchoring (applause here)
• Landscape and portrait orientation support
• COM Interop support
• Generic collections
• Native ARM support in the emulator

Gates concluded by saying that there were many features they have added that they weren’t able to demonstrate during the keynote. He said that they have extended language support to ten languages, which I can only assume meant human languages, as opposed to programming languages.

Gates said that the ecosystem surrounding Windows Mobile was a key to its success and promised that the “big numbers” surrounding profitability of creating software for Windows Mobile are just around the corner.

• Jon Box's Gates Keynote Blog