This post is based on the on going buzz in the net about the capabilities of Windows Mobile 7 due this year
1. First nothing is official, wait for next Monday (Feb 15th) for the official announcement.
2. Multitasking – Still exist but this time no one can create a busy wait loop and kill the device battery in 30min (happened to me couple of times with some applications), Making software more stable and better suitable for mobile device is good at my book.
3. Flash – Why I need to ask ? first of all WindowsMobile already good a very good solution for flash with either Skyfire (www.skyfire.com) or Opera (www.opera.com), but still the first thing I do when installing them is to disable the flash support. Flash in it current stage is not suitable to mobile devices, there is nothing to gain of using flash in mobile devices and anyone saying otherwise doesn't really understand mobile devices usage.
4. There was never a .Net FW that wasn't backward compatible to the previous one, create such a version is out of the normal development cycle for MS, so far CF was just a scale down version of the Full .NET with a CLR tuned to the requirements of memory and CPU
5. If MS will require a signature for any installed SW I guess they will provide a mechanism for signing existing SW
6. Creating Silverlight as the core of the OS is GREAT IDEA, having a single software that runs multiplatform is a killer feature
7. Making every device pass MS labs is also great IDEA, all of you knows only the HTC hardware which are made with good coordinate due to the fact they are making it for very long time, but still there is no compatibly between the HTC accelerometer and the Samsung one meaning I need to write 2 versions (or more) of the application. Look how good the introduction of signed drivers and the WHCL brought to the Windows.
8. Having over the air or even plain single point of distribution for firmware is great also, the reason XDA creates some many ROMs is basically due to the delay HTC release fixes first and new features second. This is for me the same as Windows Update (it was part of WM since 6.0 it was never used due to the item 5)
9. ActiveSync and Windows Mobile Device Center being replace, you won't see a me crying over it, they should have killed it since ActiveSync 4, version 3.8 was the last version that worth something
10. Just remember that this is my personal opinion and not an official view, some people may feel otherwise and they can keep holding their anachronistic views in the cave. You need to remember that more than 90% of the users are not developers or hardcore users and for them stable and easy to use device is a good thing, the rest of us will find way to go around the limitations like we always did.