14 DAY TRIAL // In January this year, Microsoft released a developer preview of a tool meant at offering application builders the possibility to take advantage of cloud services to improve the experience users receive from the Windows Phone 7 platform, and a new version of the software is now available for download.
The new Cloud Services SDK for Windows Phone 7 version 1.0.8 was made available for download earlier this week, following the availability of a beta version sometime in April and the developer preview we talked about in January.
The SDK was released as part of Project Hawaii, an initiative aimed at the building of mobile applications that can leverage various services.
“This is a software-development kit (SDK) for the creation of Windows Phone 7 (WP7) applications that leverage research cloud services not yet available to the public,” the tool's description reads.
“The primary goal of this SDK is to support the efforts of Project Hawaii, a student-focused initiative for exploration of how cloud-based services can be used to enhance the WP7 experience.”
With this SDK, a series of Microsoft Research experimental services (developed for students and researchers who participate to Project Hawaii) are accessible through cloud-enabled Windows Phone 7 applications.
The Hawaii Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in the Cloud service, along with the Hawaii Relay Service, the Hawaii Rendezvous Service and the Hawaii Speech to Text service were included in this project.
The Hawaii (OCR) in the Cloud service was designed to recognize the text from images, and to return the text.
Through the Hawaii Speech to Text service, spoken text can be transformed into text (at the moment, the service is available only for English).
The Hawaii Relay Service was meant to enable mobile phones to communicate directly with each other by offering a relay point in the cloud. It also enables the sending of a message to multiple endpoints.
“The Hawaii Rendezvous Service is a mapping service from well-known human-readable names to endpoints in the Hawaii Relay Service. These well-known human-readable names may be used as stable rendezvous points that can be compiled into applications,” Microsoft explains.
Additional info on the Project Hawaii can be found on Microsoft's website here. The new version of the Cloud Services SDK for Windows Phone 7 is available for download from Softpedia as well, via this link.