Windows Phone 8 news

Microsoft just announced their plans for Windows Phone 8. If the reports are correct, you will be able to create HTML5 apps using PhoneGap. This is slightly different from the Windows 8 PC where HTML5 is directly useable in Visual Studio. Until the WP8 SDK is released, the exact details are not 100% clear, but this looks like a good solution since Construct seems to work with PhoneGap (unless it doesn't).

PhoneGap isn�t designed to build a HTML5 Videogame with decent performance

Phonegap is simply a wrapper.

The real bottleneck is the default browser so we have to hope a full support of HTML5 features and hw acceleration on WP8.

BTW I didn't find WP7 performance so bad (20-25 FPS), the real problem on IE mobile is the awful touch support.

Phonegap is simply a wrapper.

The real bottleneck is the default browser so we have to hope a full support of HTML5 features and hw acceleration on WP8.

BTW I didn't find WP7 performance so bad (20-25 FPS), the real problem on IE mobile is the awful touch support.

The default browser is IE10 which has support of almost all HTML5 features. WP8 will have an NT kernel and lots of hardware acceleration. Definitely worth watching.

Apparently IE10 has multitouch, and the performance should be OK (although our test was pretty slow on Windows Phone 7, and not really usable). However it's not even out yet. So they're kinda late when the iPhone has been out with good multitouch for 5 years!

Yes, IE10 has a lot of cool HTML5 features and even some interesting proprietary features. I also suspect that the performance will be a lot better than IE9 on the phone, so stay tuned.

More information has come out of the conference, and the official info is that they will support HTML5 apps in some kind of browser control, but not as tight as the HTML5 apps in (big) Windows 8. Everyone seems focused on the ability to write C/C++ apps on the phone using the refactored NT kernel, and many are confused about what aspects of XAML/.NET will be supported.

But there will be HTML5 support and maybe we can wedge Construct in there somehow.

Maybe a tempest in a teacup since the market share for Windows Phone is pretty small now and may not do well since none of the Windows 7 phones can be upgraded to Windows 8. I guess I'll chuck my Windows 7 phone in the same pile as my Blackberry, Palm, Windows CE, and other dead technologies. <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" />