Beth Goza from Microsoft:

... organized in October 2002, on behalf of Microsoft corporation, a 3 day conference, to which one of current editors of msmobiles.com (who was at that time working on other publication) had been invited. The conference took place quite a long time ago (at that time MS Smartphone based cellphones were not yet availble on the market) but since it was very relevant to the main topic of msmobiles.com (which is: all about cellphones powered by Microsoft software), we decided to publish a short article about it here, where we will concentrate on topics related to cellphones and not touch other topics of the conference (like Smart Displays, Tablet PCs, non-cellphone Pocket PCs and some other Microsoft technologies).

 The most interesting, from our "cellphone oriented" point of view, was presentation of Jonas Hasselberg:

... and that is why we will use bigger part of this article for his presentation. While there was also a presentation about Pocket PC Phone Edition:

... but this one was showing the Phone Edition just as an addition to, already successful, Pocket PC PDA business of Microsoft.

Coming back to presentation of Jonas about Smartphone, below we present some more interesting points from his presentation.

First we must understand that both Pocket PC Phone Edition and MS Smarpthone are an extension of existing PDA from Microsoft - i.e. extension of Pocket PC PDAs:

Here we can clearly see the differences between cellphones based on Pocket PC and those based on MS Smartphone:

Here is another very important slide that covers 3 types of applications for MS Smartphones:

... but for time being, the only way to write stand-alone (i.e. not server based) applications for MS Smartphone is with help of eMbedded Visual C++. .NET for Smartphone (.NET Compact Framework) is not foreeseen in this release of Microsoft´s operating system for cellphones without touchscreen. Please note however that developers of software for Pocket PC devices have more choices: eMbedded Visual Basic and .NET Compact Framework (Visual Basic .NET and C# = C sharp).

Security topics were something that very differentiates MS Smarpthone from Pocket PC, something to what Microsoft paid very big attention and what caused lately (due to lack of possibility to run/write freeware in/for Orange SPV) a lot of anger among users.

Smartphone´s Security covers following aspects:

• Perimeter security
  • Device and SIM lock, CAB signing, application security
  • Secure device management, security roles
• Authentication Protocols
  • WTLS Class 2, SSL 3.1/TLS 1.0, PPTP
  • NTLM, PAP, CHAP, MS-CHAP v.2 l
• Cryptography
  • Encryption, Hashing, Digital Signatures
• Certificates
  • Store, manage and revoke X.509 certificates
• Operating System Security
  • System access, application execution, OTA System Updates
  • Virus hooks
• Security Policies

... and most interesting for users and smarphone software developers is Application Security in the smartphone:

• Installation and Execution based on Certificates
  • Two certificate stores: privileged, and unprivileged
  • API, registry, file system restricted based on role
  • Certificates can be installed, deleted, and revoked OTA
• Lock Down Phone using Certificates:
  

During the conference participants could touch and play with some real hardware, most interesting of which was MS Smartphone made by Compal:

This conference clearly showed, that this time Microsoft is seriously entering cellphone industry.