Microsoft Research has created on the market for download a developer preview of its Windows Phone seven + Cloud Companies Software Advancement Kit (SDK).
The new SDK is related to Task Hawaii,
Cheap Office 2010, a cellular analysis initiative which I;ve blogged about just before. Hawaii is about employing the cloud to enhance mobile units. The “building blocks” for Hawaii applications/services include computation (Windows Azure); storage (Windows Azure); authentication (Windows Live ID); notification; client-back-up; client-code distribution and location (Orion).
The SDK is “for the creation of Windows Telephone 7 (WP7) applications that leverage research solutions not yet on the market to the general public,” according to the download page.
The first two services that are part of the January 25 SDK are Relay and Rendezvous. The Relay Service is designed to enable mobile phones to communicate directly with each other, and to get around the limitation developed by mobile service providers who don;t provide most cellular phones with consistent public IP addresses. The Rendezvous Service is a mapping service “from well-known human-readable names to endpoints in the Hawaii Relay Service.” These names may be used as rendezvous points that can be compiled into applications,
Office Ultimate 2007 Key, according to the Hawaii Study page.
The Hawii team is working on other services which it is planning to release in dev-preview form by the end of February 2011. These include a Speech-to-Text service that will take an English spoken phrase and return it as text,
Office 2007 Pro Plus Key, as well as an “OCR in the cloud” service that will allow testers to take a photographic image that contains some text and return the text. “For example, given a JPEG image of a road sign,
Microsoft Office Pro Plus 2007, the service would return the text of the sign as a Unicode string,
Office 2007 Standard,” the researchers explain.
Microsoft officials said earlier this week that the company sold last quarter 2 million Windows Telephone 7 operating system licenses to OEMs for them to put on phones and provide to the carriers. (This doesn;t mean 2 million Windows Phone 7s have been sold, just to reiterate.) Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 in October in Europe. There are still no Windows Telephone 7 phones accessible from Verizon or Sprint in the U.S. Microsoft and those carriers have said there will be CDMA Windows Phone 7s on those networks some time in 2011.