There has been a lot of discussion about Windows 8, Metro-style apps, Intel vs ARM, etc., from the time Windows 8 Developer Preview was released at //build/ last year. A lot of the discussion and debates have to do with unclear communication and secrecy from the Windows team at Microsoft. For example, what exactly is the deal with Windows on ARM devices? Are they going to be a hard cutoff from today’s Windows and not have a desktop experience at all, or will they have a desktop experience? Will the desktop experience be open for all developers or only certain developers (like Microsoft Office) to provide signed apps for ARM which use a restricted desktop?

(Ed: On February 9, Steven Sinofsky posted details about Windows on ARM on the Building Windows 8 Blog, so some of the secrecy has been taken away. However, the points made here are in fact reinforced by the details revealed in the post.)

Those discussions and speculations aside, I truly believe Windows 8 is a huge opportunity for developers. In this post, I will tell you why I believe so. First of all, some math: According to Canalys, there were 415MM PCs sold in 2011. This is after accounting for a decline in sales per original projections! Even though smartphones have exceeded the number of PCs sold, that PC sales number is still a very large number.

Now, let’s assume that those 415MM PCs are split 60-40 with regard to sales to businesses vs. consumers. Taking a round number of 400MM PCs a year gives us about 160MM PCs sold to consumers a year. I am ignoring business PCs for now because let’s face it – they are not going to Windows 8 for some time, and even if they do, there is a strong likelihood of them turning off Metro via IT policies. Consumers on the other hand, won’t have the ability to turn it off, and all new PCs will ship with Windows 8 (Intel or ARM).

Need bragging rights as a developer? Don’t have enough points and badges from Xbox Live? Well, Microsoft has the answer for you, Visual Studio Achievements!

In what seems to be an effort to rile developers up through ‘gamification’, Microsoft has announced a beta campaign called “Visual Studio Achievements”. By installing the Visual Studio Achievements Extension, you can unlock badges and earn points by simply writing code that you were already going to write! Analysis is done in the background each time you compile your project to test it. When you hit a certain objective, you unlock an achievement.

Next comes the leaderboard. All the points and badges you earn are tallied into a score and you’re stuck up onto an online leaderboard with all other registered developers who are taking part in the campaign. You can view challenging developer points, avatars and maybe eventually see what they are working on. It would be a great way to get developers to collaborate on ideas and projects.

If sharing your achievements with alike developers wasn’t enough, you can share badges through Twitter and Facebook. This can help you raise awareness for your application, and get recognition from your peers.

There are over 32 different badges you can unlock, from as easy as loading more extensions into Visual Studio, to as hard as having 50 different projects tied to a single solution.

There are fun badges, like the “Potty Mouth” achievements which rewards you for using 5 different curse words in a project, or the “Time for an Upgrade” badge that is unlocked if your project takes over 10 minutes to compile. It’s a simple way to add a level of fun to programming and give developers a way to show off their skills.

Nokia is very strong in location-based services and to demonstrate this strength, they have a few apps pre-loaded on their Windows Phones, like Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive, Nokia Transport, Nokia Pulse and Nokia City Lens. I got a chance to look at Nokia Drive and Nokia Transport at the Nokia booth during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Nokia Drive is the free turn-by-turn navigation app that comes pre-loaded on Nokia Windows Phones. It lets you search an extensive database of points of interest (POI) and also get directions to a specific address. Nokia Drive comes in 50 languages and in 100 countries, and allows downloads of specific maps to the phone so that it works even when the phone is not connected to the network.

Nokia Transport is in beta, and it is an app which lets you get from one place to another via public transport (including walking). The interesting part about this app, as you will see in the video, is the ability to pin a certain route to your Start Screen. This pinned Live Tile then keeps you updated with the next 3 times of departure for your route. This app demonstrates the beauty of the Windows Phone OS: pinning the route to the Start Screen allows you to get to that route instantly without opening the app and then searching for the route, and the Live Tile which keeps updating the route timings throughout the day.

Nokia Transport comes with information on public transport in 450 cities in 46 countries.

Enjoy the videos below.

Nokia Drive and Nokia Transport

For my hands on with Nokia Lumia 900, see this post. For a walkthrough of the Nokia ESPN app, see this post.

Google has just announced via the GoogleTV’s official blog that they will soon be rolling out a major update for its Google TV platform.  With this update, the big G is hoping to revive this dead platform.

Google has focused on four main areas in this update, which are as follow-:

1) Keep it Simple – The whole interface of the Google TV has been redesigned, and is now much simpler. The home screen is now customizable, and users also get an ‘App drawer’ similar to their Android handsets.

2) Make it easy to find something – Google has vastly improved the search feature of with this update, and has made it easier for users to find content from Live TV, Netflix, YouTube, HBO GO and more services. There is also a dedicated “TV & Movies” app, which lets users browse through 80,000 movies and TV episodes from across a bunch of services.

3) Make YouTube better on TV – The software update will tightly integrated YouTube with Google TV, and make it easy for users to find their desired content on YouTube.

4) Bring more apps to TV – Lastly, the software update will bring a bunch of apps for Google TV through the Android Market. Developers can now port their Android apps to TV, or create new ones. Right now, more than 50 developers have released apps specifically for Google TV.

The software update will be coming to Sony devices from early next week. Logitech devices like the Revue will get the update soon after.