dmcconachie wrote:...
Yeah, it was talked about a lot on here at the time. It's a strange one though because Microsoft obviously have a very strong alliance with Nokia now who essentially have a competing product.

My theory was that they might be licensing Waze's tech because of the issue they have with Navteq and their existing Bing navigation (press to continue) but no sign of that so far. But then there's the Nokia nav... Currently is exclusive to the disappointing Nokia phones, but I think eventually that opens up to all the WP7s. TBD...

http://wmpoweruser.com/a-demo-of-nokia- ... ws-phone-7

Nokia Maps is coming to all Windows Phones. And I find the Nokia phones disappointing compared to the HTC Titan and Samsung Focus S. Those both have front facing cameras (among other niceties), but the current Nokias do not. The rumored Nokia 900 / Sabre looks promising, but I guess its not ready yet.

BUT it appears the Nokia Drive (spoken turn by turn) is Nokia exclusive, at least to start. Oh well...

We don't plan to release a version of Waze for Windows Phone 7 in the near future

So you will continue developing on 6.5? For how long? Seems like an odd choice.

Good news on the horizon?

http://www.bgr.com/2011/07/12/microsoft ... pany-waze/

Ran across this a few days ago. Someone has taken the Waze public API's and ported them to WP7.

https://github.com/meirtsvi/WazeWP7

I've been running it for a few days. It's a bit rough still but it works really well. It's still a work in progress. Only catch is you need a developer unlocked phone to load the code.

C'mon Waze, if a single individual is able to do this on his own I doubt it would take that much effort to release an official version. I think it's clear with more major phone manufacturers producing WP7 phones that this is a viable OS.

gettingthere wrote:

jklier wrote:I think it's clear with more major phone manufacturers producing WP7 phones that this is a viable OS.

Unfortunately more phones is not yet equaling more market share...

No, but "yet" is the key word. The new Mango update is getting excellent reviews. Nokia and HTC have publicly made statements about their confidence in the OS. Nokia, HTC, Samsung all have numerous new WP7 phones being released.

Pyramind Research, Gartner and other analysts have predicted 20+ % market share in the next few years. The real numbers so far have shown growth as flat however those generally lump in phones running the old Windows Mobile 6.5 which is certainly losing users. That makes it difficult to tell the real growth of WP7.

I know predictions are about like fortune telling. Only time will tell.

AlanOfTheBerg wrote:

flyfire wrote:Is it time to think about Windows Phone 8?

Is the market penetration of Windows Phone x big enough that Waze will actually see a benefit to their bottom line? The amount of money they spend on development must be less than the revenue generation potential.

I believe it will be.

Robin

To be honest if I had proper API's descriptions available I'd be happy to work on an open source effort to port or rewrite Waze for WP7. I've not looked at the WM6.5 source yet so I can't speak to the ease/difficulty of doing the job...

* Update : I've had a little look at the WM6.5 code (only very briefly) and I've not compiled it so far (I need to check on some dependencies in VS2010 which I probably don't have installed) but, Waze are right here - it's not trivial so they're not going to want to do it unless they can guarantee some serious traction. But if they were to do it then they may have to endure a significant shakeup and migrate the entire codebase to mono/.net to retain their ability to target iphone, android and symbian handsets from a single codebase.

OMG, I just switched to W7 with Verizon. I did not realize that I could not use Waze. What am I going to do without my Waze!