Let the cloud do the muscle work for your phone. That's what Microsoft envisions for its Windows Phone 7. The Redmond giant has released a software development kit that enables cloud-based applications to run on its mobile operating system. The developer preview package, which facilitates "research services not yet available to the general public", is an extension of a student-focused mobile research initiative known as Project Hawaii.
It's a mouthful, but it simply means users can look forward to running more resource intensive apps such as object and speech recognition, as well as multiplayer gaming without being bogged down by the hardware limitations of the phone.
According to Victor Bahl, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, Project Hawaii comprises Windows Azure/Internet Information Services (Web application servers) for computation and data storage, Bing Maps for converting geographical coordinates to a map or street address and Windows Live ID for user authentication.
The first two services--Relay Service and Rendezvous Service--are currently available with theSDK released January 25. These will enable mobile apps to communicate directly with each other via a relay point in the cloud.
The other two services, which will be available by the end of February, are Optical Character Recognition in the Cloud and Speech to Text. The former would be able to identify text from a picture of a road sign, while Speech to Text does exactly what its name says: It coverts spoken words into English text.
Via Damian Koh
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