Microsoft Tech.Ed 2010: all about Phone 7
Those who were expecting the focus of this year's Tech.Ed 2010 to be on Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 smartphone were not disappointed.
August des los Reyes (Credit: Josh Taylor/ZDNet Australia)
Microsoft Australia developer evangelist Michael Kordahi set the tone, telling the audience at the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre last night that over 70 per cent of the attendees of Tech.Ed were using smartphones.
"Does that mean around 30 per cent of you don't have a smartphone?" he joked.
"When you switch on a Phone 7 it becomes apparent that the user interface is just one part of it," he added. "The cloud is what is going to make [the] phone really impactful."
In a demonstration that Kordahi said took 20 days to assemble, he showed off the ability to use Windows Phone 7 together with Microsoft's Surface table screen and a tablet device to make TV show recommendations, as well as watch TV shows and live replays using Foxtel's cloud television service built on Azure.
Microsoft also used the keynote event to show off a number of apps on a Windows Phone 7 prototype including Telstra One and Domain.com.au's real estate app.
August des los Reyes, Microsoft's former principal director of user experience, took a more zen approach for his keynote address, where he spoke about moving beyond the natural user interfaces for hardware and software design, to a model that was "semantic, syntactic and pragmatic".
It was easy to tell customs officials what sort of design work he did at Microsoft, joked des los Reyes.
"I peer over the desk and say 'see on the keyboard, the key next to your space bar? I designed that'."
Josh Taylor is attending Tech.Ed 2010 as a guest of Microsoft Australia