Why the lack of innovation and Silverlight in Windows CE?

Question

The manager asked me to do some quick research on the possibility of developing Silverlight on Windows CE devices.

After 15 minutes, I was surprised that:

• Silverlight for Windows CE seems to be nowhere to be seen , and some sites want to report it so badly that they citing twitter tweets as a news source, the word “mobile” is not even present in Silverlight 3 Feature Lists , but you can find it in the comments with people who say things like I was hoping to hear an update about getting Silverlight on Windows Mobile and Nokia devices.

• Windows CE 6.5, which has not yet been released, receives critical reviews , such as in this article , which basically says: nothing new, interface improvements beyond the curve, interface improvements (cellular) skin, no capacitive touch screens, is not expected until the fourth quarter of 2009 years, not backward compatible, no zune, no new Windows media players, no decent keyboard screen, browser fades against competition, and number 10: showing little innovation in its latest mobile OS, Microsoft is showing zero leadership in mobile space ve. Microsoft seems to be weakly limping in the shadow of the iPhone . Silverlight's obvious flaw in Windows CE 6.5 did not even make a list of issues.

I thought everything was different. So, unfortunately, I have to report that Silverlight on mobile devices may have to wait a year or more.

Does anyone have more positive, significant news that I can report on Silverlight on mobile devices?

Update using YMS (not the original OP):
This question is now outdated since Windows Compact 7 was released with (some) Silverlight support .

Answer 1

I also very recently researched the use of Silverlight in Windows CE. The result is that although it seems that almost there, with a video showing it from MIX08, it may be released some time this year, but most likely not in the first half. They said "some time in 2009," and for several months it was in "private testing."

Because of this, although I would like to use Silverlight, I decided to go with OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenVG, which is fully hardware accelerated on our current target device. Many features are not so difficult to use even from the .NET Compact Framework.

Oh, and the iPhone is all cool for the phone (or music player), but Windows CE is available for many other devices, including non-personal gadgets / non-mobile products. This is an area where Apple does not shine because they do not license their platform.

Answer 2

I heard rumors that the user interface for WindowsMobile 7.0 will be based on Silverlight / WPF. It is not like Microsoft is working hard on any version before that, because as soon as WM7 comes out, they will want to kill everything that was before.