What is the Difference between Windows Phone 7 and Zune HD?

From a customer point of view the main difference is that you can buy a Zune HD now, but a Windows Phone purchase remains a distant prospect. However, there are other differences:

The Zune HD can run XNA games developed in Visual Studio 2008 using XNA 3.1. It doesn’t support 3D games, but it does provide multi-touch and accelerometer support (although the Windows Phone accelerometer is accessed in a different way at the moment).

The Zune HD does provide programmatic access to the media content in the same way as Windows Phone will.

If you are thinking of getting a Zune HD as a way of getting started writing 2D XNA games that use multi-touch input then this is not a bad idea. Another plus point to this approach is that you end up with a Zune HD, which is a very well specified media player with a fantastic OLED screen and some lovely features.  Performance wise the Zune HD can handle a surprisingly large number of simultaneous sprites and the Windows Phone hardware will do even better.

Bear in mind that if you are not from the USA you will have to buy a “grey” import device and will not have access to the subscription services.

Comments

[Apoorva]

How do i get the list of apps installed on the user's phone.. is there any API that can be used to do this?