Having covered the news yesterday that Silverlight will (sometime this century) be available on Windows Mobile and select Nokia Symbian devices, I’m extremely disappointed to discover a few realities.

I’ve now watched yesterday’s Mix08 T12 Session (not a great session with projector issues, drawn out introduction, boring demos and of course disappointing news).

With regard to their current (pre-CTP) implementation:

• It’s Silverlight 1.0
• It runs in Pocket/Mobile IE
• It uses JScript for scripting – no .NET!!!! – so much for the closed loop now.
• It doesn’t have a common codec; it uses the devices available codec, going against one of the selling points of Silverlight being cross-platform.
• It runs on Mobile 6.0 – PDA and phone devices
• It uses Windows Mobile Player on the device to play movies – you can’t have alpha blending of video – this one is fair enough I suppose.

The presentation included comments about taking out the .NET code and putting in JScript, like this was a trivial thing.

The big selling point of Silverlight 2.0 is .NET development on the desktop, browser and server, plus WPF on the desktop/browser.  This is a step back and it hasn’t even got to CTP yet.

They demo’d WPF/E (the former name for Silverlight) over two years ago at a PDC on a mobile device.  What has Microsoft been doing for 2 years with this???

Their roadmap:

• Silverlight 1.0 for mobile CTP Q2 2008
• Silverlight 1.0 for mobile RTW Q4 2008
• Silverlight 2.0 for mobile CTP Q4 2008
• Silverlight 2.0 for mobile RTW Q2 2009

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