Life by bits & numbers
An interesting marketing stunt performed by Microsoft’s marketing at CES – betting people $100 that they won’t be as fast on their phone compared to Windows Phone to perform some task like posting information to social networks, checking weather, finding a place to eat etc…
To top that, everyone who got smoked got a brand new Windows Phone. Microsoft you are moving in the right direction!
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An interesting infographics was published on the WP7 developer blog.
The most interesgint points that we saw are that 56% of the users can purchase apps via carrier billing which is amazing number for a young platform. Android did not have carrier billing for at least a year into its existence if not two years. Which was a significant barrier for selling paid apps since billing mechanism was not oiled like on Apple’s iOS platform where all the users have iTunes setup with their billing information.
Surprising enough the Games category is not as huge as we’d expect it to be. Taking a little smaller percentage than the Entertainment apps in the app to category distribution. But in the paid apps category Games are far ahead of any other category in purchases which of course should not be surprising, although this trend is not so prominent on other platforms.
Overall it seems pretty good info and quite useful for developers. Enjoy!
If you were playing with the “Live Tiles” from the latest (at the moment) OS update to the Windows Phone code named “Mango”, you might have been wondering what makes Live tiles unique and how many live tiles can be placed on the home screen of the user. Accidentally I found out that what makes the live tile unique is the tile reference or the tile URI
a usual way to create a tile would be:
so whenever you change the value1 and value 2, a new live tile can be created.
Happy coding and have fun with the live tiles!
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If you are getting the:
“failed to connect to device as it is pin locked”
when trying to deploy your app to a windows phone 7 device no worries. Just make sure to disable the “screen lock” or “screensaver” whatever it is called. That’s what it is all about!
I was lucky to figure this one immediately but if you got here means you got stuck with it and had to look it up. Hopefully this will help you with that problem.
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