While the first day of MIX10 continues in some way or another, with smaller meetings and meet-ups throughout the day, the major keynote from the heads of Microsoft has wrapped up, and now we are collecting the data, and passing it along to you. This time around, we’ve got the latest intelligence about what Microsoft is doing for system notifications, as well as third party notifications.
The mainstay of the mobile phone market is multitasking. Can your phone do it? If it doesn’t, why not? In the case of Windows Phone 7 Series, it seems that (at least) some of the third party applications that will be developed for the mobile Operating System will be based on a push notification system, and not allowed to run in the background. We have reason to believe that at least first-party applications, like Zune music and what not will be able to work in the background, and even some third party apps like Pandora, so we don’t quite know the extent of this notification style’s reach.
While we love multitasking, we actually cherish our battery life a lot more. As Microsoft showed in the keynote, using Major League Soccer’s application, running in the background just isn’t necessary. So instead, they’ll offer to push notifications (which appear at the top of the phone in a discrete blue bar, which scrolls to show you a preview of the information) to your attention, and you can choose what you want to do from there. This should save the battery life, and help the phone’s performance quite a bit, and it seems smart enough that it won’t make us miss our extensive multitasking ability all that much at all.
Discuss Windows Phone 7 Series at Windows Phone Forums!
