A few interesting notes for developers:
- No native database support is built-in to Windows Phone 7 Series
- This does NOT mean you can’t use SQL Azure for cloud-based data access
- A managed solution could be built – so that’s something important to write
- This is strictly for consumers at this point – it is *not* for LOB or Embedded solutions
- Visual Studio 2008 will remain the way to write 6.5.x apps, and no plans have been made for VS2010 support of current phones (???)
- It appears WP7S is not the next generation Windows Phone, but a completely new line of phone devices strictly for consumers
- Windows Phone 6.5.x will continue to be made, and “no end of life plans have been announced”
- In this release, 3rd party apps will always be paused when a user switches out of them
- “Multitasking-like” capabilities will be available
- Most common background types of tasks that users care about, such as music playback, will be available
- Developers have access to these “common tasks”
- Live Tiles on Start screen, combined with Notification System, can respond to events from the Notification System
- Controlling the overall end user experience
- “In This Release” keeps being said. I’m guessing this means the first generation of Windows Phones will be a trial run of Microsoft’s new approach.
Auri's Blog 
Aloha & Happy Holidays from Hawaii,
I am the president of a club. This month I convinced many members to get Window7 Phones – we are returning them. We are all individual users. Now we can’t sync ALL of THE INFO in our contacts info from Outlook to their phones (no problem doing it with iPhones).
Below is a message I tried to get to Microsoft with no success …
This is ridiculous — we are returning all of our Windows 7 Phones and getting iPhones!! We can easily sync our Outlook contacts to iPhones without any problems!
We tried the Windows Live and some of the other solutions and they are not good. They are convoluted and the limits are way too restrictive.and the free-form field in the contacts (in which you can enter any information you like for a contact) were either eliminated or truncated! On the iPhones it’s not only much easier — everything is there! I have approx 1,600 contacts, some of which have considerable info in the free form part (I don’t know what the actual name of this ‘field’)
How absurd is it that a major Microsoft product can’t get along well with the Windows 7 Phone or Windows Live but can with the iPhone!
Also after hours of trying to find ways on the website to communicate with Microsoft — we experience NOTHING BUT FRUSTRATION — IT SAYS “TO CONTACT US” AND WE END IN AND ENDLESS LOOP WHICH NEVER LEADS TO A WAY TO CONTACT A HUMAN BEING!
Ron