First off is Twitter integration into the people hub. Much like the way Facebook has been integrated, Twitter will also see a close integration in the people hub allowing you to easily see what your friends are tweeting about right along side of those Facebook updates.  Full SkyDrive integration is also coming before the end of 2011. This will allow you to get those Office documents from the cloud to the phone without the hassle found today.

IE mobile will be moving to the IE 9 engine by the end of the year. The same engine used in IE 9 on the desktop will be powering IE 9 Mobile on Windows Phone, with full support for HTML 5 and hardware acceleration. During the demo, they showed the a Windows Phone 7 device running the IE9 Fish test page above with 50 fish swimming around versus the same page on an iPhone 4 device. No question, the Windows Phone device was swimming circles around the iPhone. The end result is a super rich browsing experience on the mobile platform and once again, coming to Windows Phone before the end of 2011.

Another addition heading to Windows Phone users before the end of 2011 is “full” multi-tasking. Steve was quick to poke the stick at competitors that offer a half baked multi-tasking solution, but failed to elaborate on how they will be offering multi-tasking without run-away apps and the battery hit that Windows Mobile suffered from. Microsoft did talk about how this has been specially designed to minimize the impact on the battery. But we really don’t know much more than that at this time. Along with multi-tasking comes fast application switching with a long press on the back button. The current behavior of the back button will not change, but the addition of application switching will be possible with a long press on the back button. This will result in a series of cards that pop up on the screen allowing you to scroll between each of the open applications. All in all, it looks very slick and very promising.

Before leaving the stage, Microsoft shared a video showing just one of the ideas they are working on for a greater sense of integration between Windows Phone and the Xbox. This early sample shows the Windows Phone running as a extension of the Xbox and Kinect allowing others to be part of the experience.

The following video’s show off the multi-tasking demo and then the extensions for Xbox with Kinect. However, if you want to see the full keynote, you can watch it in its entirety over on Microsoft’s site.

Enter Mark Arteaga, a fellow Windows Mobile MVP. Mark’s recent post takes an in-depth look at multitasking on Windows Phone 7. He talks about the 4 different application states and how they impact applications. He goes on to create a sample application that simply increments a counter as time goes by. With the sample application deployed to the emulator, Mark launches the Start Menu, opened another application called EnergizeIT Mobile, launched the Start Menu again, selected the sample application and it returns to the foreground showing that the counter value has incremented while the process was in the background. For all the developers in the crowd, Mark even provides you the code he used to run the threads.

End result is that Windows Phone 7 does support multitasking and from the looks of what Mark did, it supports more than the 7 simple situations that Apple has exposed in version 4 of their iPhone OS.

You can check out all the details and even the sample code that Mark provides, over on his blog.

There’s a lot of focus on multitasking these days, so I wanted to run through what Apple announced and what it means for developers and the applications you use every day. Apple’s focus was to find a way to allow multitasking but without allowing background processes that end up killing your performance and battery life.

“How are we adding multitasking while preserving battery life and performance. We looked at tens of thousands of apps in the app store, and we’ve distilled the services those apps need to run in the background. So we implemented those services, and we’re providing those services as APIs to developers so they can add multitasking while preserving battery life.” – Scott Forstall, SVP of iPhone Software via live.gdgt.com

The announcement goes on to define the seven (7) background services they are providing – Background audio, Voice over IP, Background location, Push notifications, Local notifications, Task completion, and Fast app switching. These are the only multitasking services exposed to the developer. Let’s quickly run down what each one of these can do for you:

1. Background audio – obviously, great for listening to music while using other applications
2. Voice over IP – pretty straight forward again, great for services like Skype
3. Background location – this will enhance applications like FourSquare as the app can automatically grab GPS co-ordinates while you’re not actively using it. Also a great advantage for turn-by-turn directions.
4. Push notifications – this has been in the product for the last 9 months,
5. Local notifications – this is based on the push notifications, but there is no server, they are local to the phone
6. Task completion – this allows the developer to put a task in motion and forget about it. For example, think of uploading a large file. The developer could code the app to upload that file in the background and this frees up the user to browse away from that screen. There doesn’t appear to be any way for the application to interact with that process once it’s launched. So it would effectively run to completion or until it times out.

Those are the only multitasking processes allowed at this time. While they are pretty nice features, there’s still no way for me to open my RSS reader, start it updating and then switch to email or browse the web while it downloads in the background. It’s great that Apple has released multitasking, but to be clear, it’s not full on multitasking. It’s a limited scope of features. This approach allows them to keep tight control over processes and applications and ensure that the device remains fairly stable. Perhaps Apple will release more ability in the future, but for now, there is limited multitasking ability.

Apple also seems to think that there’s no need for a task manager. This could prove to be a problem as they’re letting developers spin off task completion treads but there’s not way for the end user to manage those.  If they hang or maybe there’s too many being generated by an app, there’s no way to kill that process.

More details should be coming out over the next little while as developers download and test out OS 4.0.

(The information in this article is not based on materials from Microsoft directly but rather a mixture of released and assumed information reported throughout the internet)

You would have to admit that Microsoft has been very brave with its decisions for WP7S. While they certainly did need to make a shift away from Windows Mobile 6.X no one thought they would do so in such a dramatic way. The UI is completely different and innovative, legacy apps will not work with it, it is locked down with apps only being installed from the Marketplace, it’s an all new development environment (sorta) and there will be no multitasking.

Ok, there will be multitasking of sorts, but in a limited fashion. I don’t know all the ins and outs but most likely some core apps like music, email and such should be able to run in the background. WP7S will then use notifications much like the iPhone to alert you of a changed state with apps in the background.

With all the noise many iPhone users have been making about the need for multitasking how is that Microsoft thinks it can get away with leaving it out? It really looks like Apple is about to add multitasking to the iPhone in 4.0, so is this going to be a real misstep by the Redmond gang?

I have said in the past that iPhone could address the need for multitasking without actually doing it if they supported, or made ‘remembered state’ mandatory in apps. If an app can open up almost instantly right to where it was the last time you were in it you probably wouldn’t care that it was not actually running in the background.

Of course, some apps will need either to actually run in the background of use notifications to alert users as needed. This is where the juggling act comes in, and this is where Microsoft needs to get it right. If they can balance these two and do notifications very well the OS will actually feel like it is a multitasked environment.

I can’t say I am happy about the lack of multitasking, but doing the above would certainly go a long way to helping and may assuage my fears. It doesn’t really matter though…I’m getting a Windows Phone 7 Series phone either way! Can’t wait!

With multitasking environments you can have multiple programs running at the same time. Many mobile OS’ have been doing this for a while now and it makes so much sense to have. We are continually becoming more used to multitasking ourselves; especially while on the go. Having a multitasked OS means you can be in the middle of writing an email or editing a contact and jump over to the calendar to check on an appointment. When you jump back to the email or contact you are right where you left off, mid-edit; your cursor is in the same place and ready for you to continue. It makes for a MUCH more powerful and productive use of on-the-go time.

Apple could have easily simulated this without breaking from their decision to opt out of multitasking the iPhone. They could have had applications open up to exactly the state they were in when last closed, especially if you were mid-edit. That would mean you could be editing a contact and go to a webpage to copy their address and jump back to the contact to paste it in.

By combining notifications with this little change to applications Apple would have a sort-of-multitasking environment without any of the performance hit they are worried about. With the new iPhone 3Gs being so fast this makes even more sense, as switching between apps is much faster.

I also think they should have a quick pop-up menu that shows the last 3 or 5 apps used so that you can jump to those apps quickly rather than having to go back to the application launcher every time.

Anyway, now that my idea is on the intertubes I can sue Apple if they implement it. Kthxbai