[Windows Phone 7 General] sylau90:
Credited and thanks so much to WINFONE7 in official windows phone 7 backstage forum by provide us these useful information. What I do is just copy and paste it here to share with XDA users and reduce the confusion.

So far we know Microsoft broke away from its native Windows Mobile stack and introduced a managed API platform for developers. Developers can use this platform to build third-party mobile apps that run on Microsoft Windows Phone OS 7.0 devices, which are expected at retail in October. The company's new line of attack rests on driving .NET developers and designers to use familiar tools and skill sets to build WP7 apps for a consumer marketplace. The WP7 application development platform is based on the Microsoft rich Internet application framework Silverlight, its gaming framework XNA and the .NET Compact Framework for micro devices. In February, Microsoft announced the XNA Framework -- which is used to build Xbox 360, Windows PC and Zune apps -- now supports Windows Phone and Silverlight. Microsoft is also leveraging its consumer-focused product channels and services by integrating Zune Media, Xbox Live and Windows Azure cloud services, a major focus throughout all of its products going forward. The Windows Phone System Design, which is code-named "Metro" for its allegiance to international signage in a clean layout with an original typeface, is closer to the Microsoft media player Zune HD than Windows. WP7 applications will be distributed through the Windows Phone Marketplace -- accessible via an integrated "hub" on all WP7 devices -- and through desktop PCs. In a model that's similar to the Apple App Store, developers can monetize their apps and earn up to 70 percent of revenues from applications that pass the Microsoft certification requirements. WP7 features an Office hub with Excel, Word, OneNote, SharePoint integration and networking in Silverlight, with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), HttpWebRequest and WebClient. The user's personalized content on the phone drives the contextual experience, from live dynamic tiles on the Start screen to task--oriented hubs that offer a wider-than-the-screen panoramic view. Developers can build apps that take up a single screen, plug in to a Windows Phone app like the photo editor, or build hub-based panoramic experiences. You'll be able to create apps that look and feel like the Windows Phone apps that come in the box, but you'll also be able to go away from that. If you want to build a video game that's full screen and doesn't use any of the look-and-feel of Windows Phone, you can certainly do that as well. Microsoft is trying to ensure a consistent user experience for end users on both the hardware and software platforms. The WP7 devices, despite having different manufacturers, will all use an ARMv7 architecture with Cortex/Scorpion processor (or better) from Qualcomm Inc., a unified graphics subsystem (DirectX9), only two screen sizes and support capacitive touchscreens with four contact points. Other hardware specifications include 256MB RAM, 8GB Flash and a 5MP camera. First-generation WP7 devices will ship with a 800x480 WVGA touchscreen, with 480x320 HVGA expected sometime after the launch. When the second resolution is shipped, application and game developers will be expected to support both.WP7 supports standard phone-specific functionality and sensors that developers can tap into, such as location (Wi-Fi, cellular and GPS) and map control (Bing), compass, light proximity and accelerometer and push notifications. The location API works with Windows Azure cloud services. Despite the uniformity, WP7 devices will be available in different form factors; so far three prototypes have been shown. Chassis 1 is the ASUS phone used in engineering and demos by Microsoft with the onscreen keyboard. A second design is a sliding QWERTY keyboard by LG Electronics; the third is the Samsung slab-style phone.

I don't think these are final representations. Manufacturers are getting a great deal of flexibility in the look and feel of the phone. There will be a lot of innovation and industrial designs that are going to be available between now and the foreseeable future.

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Q: Will my current Windows Mobile phone get a Windows Phone 7 (WP7) update?

A: It's been announced that no current WinMo phone device (inc. the HD2) will be receiving an official WP7 update.

Q: How much will a WP7 phone cost; Who will manufacturer the phone?

A: WP7 isn't a phone, it's an all new Mobile Operating System from Microsoft. WP7 devices will be available from several device makers; HTC, Dell, LG, Samsung, Asus, etc. Prices will vary and is expected to be along the lines of current smartphone pricing.

Q: When will WP7 phone devices be available?

A: According to the announcement from Microsoft, phones will be available for the Holiday season, speculation is some of the first devices will be announced late September. Official release is rumored to be in October for Europe and November for the United States.

Q: Which US wireless service providers, will offer WP7 phones?

A: All the major wireless service providers in the US will offer WP7 phone devices. AT&T was announced as a Premier partner; might be the first to offer a WP7 phone or/and sell exclusive devices or features.

Q: Will there be Copy & Paste?

A: As it stands, No, this feature will not be available at release, according to Microsoft, WP7 will have smart links / smart sensing, this takes away the need for the copy/paste method in many situations. Smart links; which recognize a block of text, such as a hyperlink, phone number, or address, allow a specific action to be taken.

For a phone number, such "smart links" would allow the number to be dialed. An address might get pulled up in the mapping program, while clicking on a hyperlink would open that page in the browser. Implementing Copy/Paste would delay WP7's release, so MS is giving us the smart sensing feature at release, but several sources have reported Copy/Paste will come in form of an early update, but there is no official confirmation from Microsoft as of yet.

Q. Does Windows Phone support multitasking?

A.Yes, WP7 supports full out multitasking but 3rd party applications will not be allowed to run in the background unless it is through a MS service; instead the app will be paused when changing to another app., (Dehydrated state). This will allow the app to be brought back to the exact same state it was in before it was paused; reducing the strain on the phone's resources. (Hydrated state) (iPhone OS4 multitasking is similar)

Scenario: If an application is running when you the user switches to another application (by using the Start menu, or tapping on a notification, or via some other means) then the assumption as a platform is that the user now wants to focus on the new application, and doesn’t want the previous one interrupting their experience by grabbing memory, CPU, network bandwidth, or other resources. When an application is suspended, during this time, the application can save global state to disk, sign-off from web sites, or perform other clean-up operations. In general this should be relatively simple, because the page-based model of Windows Phone applications facilitates a relatively stateless programming model – much of your application’s state can be encoded in page URIs (as query-string data) or as small blobs of state, stored and retrieved on each page navigation, just like the web. After your application has finished pausing, it will be suspended and no further user code will execute. Note that you can still have push notifications coming in from the cloud, so the user can be kept up-to-date via toasts or you can have your tile updated with the latest information from the web. When your application is suspended, it is not killed immediately. If the user returns to the application “soon” then it can be resumed very quickly and the state saved during pause may not even be necessary. But if the user launches other applications that end up needing a lot of memory, your process will be killed and the memory will be relinquished to the foreground application. This is a key difference between Windows Phone 7 and previous versions of Windows Mobile – the foreground application gets access to virtually all the resources on the phone (memory, CPU, etc.) without having to worry about being starved by background apps that are doing random things at unpredictable times in the background.

If your process was not killed, resume is trivial – you don’t need to restore any state from disk, but you may need to re-start device features like accelerometer or location, and you may need to re-connect to any web services. Assuming your process was killed, the app uses the previously-saved data from pause to re-create your global state, and the per-page state / query-string data to recreate the page state for each page on the back stack. The end result of all this is that users can switch back and forth between applications and have the illusion of full multi-tasking without the downside of erratic resource usage.

Q. Will I be able to customize my OS?

A.Not to the extent you could in WinMo, but in some respects - yes. The O.S. will not allow extreme tweaking. However, it is known that there are at least two themes (black on white and white on black...more are speculated to come at launch) and the tile colors can be changed currently to your choice of six colours. On a deeper level, such as modifying the underlying OS and accessing the file system - it may not be possible to do this "out of the box".

Q: Is WP7 geared just toward the consumer market only?

A: No, WP7 offers many business features at release and will continue to add more.

Business features of the WP7 OS:

Is built from the ground up using industry best practices in secure software development (Secure Development Lifecycle).

Deeply Integrates email, calendar and contacts with Exchange Server enabling rich, seamless email and calendar management to enhance productivity.

Integrates with SharePoint through the SharePoint Workspace client, enabling enhanced collaboration through offline document access and syncing.

Helps protect corporate informationby securing the device through PINs and passwords. Information is further protected by not allowing access to data via PC tethering or support for removable SD cards. In addition, Windows Phone 7 supports IT managed EAS policies such as Require Password, Password Strength, Remote Wipe and Reset to Factory Settings with multiple failed unlock attempts.

Helps ensure data reliability and integrity through application sandboxing and managed code.Windows Phone 7 ensures communications channels between applications cannot be opened and critical system resources cannot be accessed. Most malware threats are introduced through the browser. IE Mobile helps ensure that malicious code cannot be launched from web sites, thus reducing this threat.

Provides certification and verification of applications and content through Windows Phone Marketplace, further enhancing security.

Enables secure data transmission through 128 or 256 Bit SSL Encryption.

Supports secure accessto on-premise applications and network resources using Forefront Universal Access Gateway (UAG).

Is future ready with cloud / services integration. Through the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), Microsoft offers hosted Exchange and SharePoint services. Windows Phone 7 will support mobile access to BPOS from Outlook Mobile and the Office Hub.

Check out Windows Phone for business:

www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/business/default.mspx">http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/business/default.mspx

Q: What are the hardware specifications for the WP7 devices.

A: Microsoft put an end to freestyle design. Minimum hardware requirements are as follows:

Screen

Capacitive touch with 4 or more contact points

WVGA (800×480) or HVGA (480×320) resolution

No screen size requirements announced; rumors for Chassis 1 is 3.6" or larger.

Sensors

A-GPS, Accelerometer, Compass, ambient Light, Proximity sensor

Camera

5 mega pixels or more, flash required, camera shutter button required

Multimedia

No detailed specs, Codec Acceleration

Memory

256 MB RAM or more, 8 GB Flash or more

GPU

DirectX 9 and video acceleration

CPU

ARMv7 Cortex/Scorpion (1GHz) or better

5 Required Hardware Buttons

On/Off & Camera. These three, Start, Search (BING), and Back must be fixed to the front of the device.

Q: Will WP7 phones have a slide-out keyboard; what form factor will the phones be?

A: Several sources confirm that there will be three Chassis/form factors at this stage.

Chassis 1 (first devices to hit the market): Will be a slab, large touch screen with high performance specs, no hardware keyboard. Ex: HTC's rumored HD3 pictured, with a 4.5" screen.

Chassis 2: described as a portrait device with a sliding keyboard, DELL Lightning pictured, assumed to be this form factor.

Chassis 3: All we know is that it may have a smaller screen and rumors are that it may be a BB Curve or Palm Centro styled form factor.

Rumored WP7 devices

(W-stands for world phone; CDMA & GSM)

Based on research I've come across. Not confirmed.

HTC

Gold_W - Sprint

Shubert - GSM

Mondrian - GSM

Spark_W - Verizon

Scorpio, aka Olympian - Verizon

Mozart - GSM

T8788 (slide out speaker) - GSM - AT&T

HD7 (rumored to be HD3)

LG

GW910, aka Panther - GSM/CDMA

E900 - GSM

C900 - GSM

Optimus - GSM

Samsung

I917, aka Cetus

Taylor

SGH i707

i8700

DELL

Lightning - GSM

ASUS

Name unknown

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Make your PC look like WP7!

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13901/make-your-pc-look-like-windows-phone-7/

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Device Connectivity (From the Windows Phone 7 Developer Forums)

Is ActiveSync still used to connect the device to the PC?

No, synchronization is automatic similar to the way the Zune HD connects to the PC.

How should I transfer information over the Internet?

Web technologies such as HTTPGET and WebServices are supported as methods of communicating on the Internet. You can also use Push Notifications for communication when your application is not running.

Can I use Sockets for peer to peer communication?

Windows Phone 7 Series currently does not expose the Socket classes. While the version of Silverlight on the phone follows closely the feature list for Silverlight 3 on the desktop, it is a subset of those features and will not contain all classes. (It also holds a superset of classes not available in Silverlight 3.)

How can I connect with another client in real-time?

Peer-to-peer communication is not supported with this initial release of Windows Phone 7 Series. We are always evaluating the needs of our developers and users though and it may be determined that this feature be added in the future.

From the Windows Phone 7 Developer Forums

Thanks dscammell

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VOICE/SPEECH RECOGNITION:

Great article on what Microsoft has in store for WP7's www.computerworld.com/s/article/9180144/Microsoft_hopes_WP_7_speech_features_surpass_Android_iPhone">http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...s_WP_7_speech_features_surpass_Android_iPhone

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Info about Microsoft's Azure Cloud

Currently Azure cloud includes:

LiveMesh

Skydrive

Microsoft’s HealthVault service

energy-monitoring Hohm service

Services currently not running on Azure: but will eventually.

Hotmail

Xbox Live

Microsoft’s hosted Exchange Online

SharePoint Online

CRM Online

Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS)

Danger services for mobile devices

Microsoft hasn’t provided a timetable as to when it will transfer all services to Azure but one thing is certain WP7 will be highly integrated with cloud services. The thought of having all this and other services MS is currently working on, gives WP7 fans a reason to get excited.

Windows Phone 7 Series Developer General FAQ

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Fo...s/thread/2892a6f0-ab26-48d6-b63c-e38f62eda3b3

Thanks again to WINFONE7

Cheers...hope this help....