14 DAY TRIAL // Launched back in March 2010 as a contest aimed at students, the Windows Phone 7 “Rockstar” Award competition has just got a winner. The competition saw a number of 131 applications being submitted by student teams, software solutions that were built through the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the developer tools, using either the Silverlight or the XNA framework. According to Microsoft, a series of very interesting applications entered the contest, and all of them were tested both on the emulator and on Windows Phone 7 devices.
To cut the story short, Microsoft announced that the winner of its Windows Phone 7 “Rockstar” Award was Beastware, a team of 2 from the Advanced Technology Academy in the United States, which came up with a mobile game called Droid. “This game leveraged the use of the accelerometer on the device unlike any other app we’ve seen. The Beastware team is our “Rockstar”. The team members are invited to Poland where the team will be awarded USD8000 and each team member will receive a Windows Phone,” a recent post on the Windows Phone Developer Blog notes.
So as to offer us a glimpse at what the game was able to offer, the Redmond-based software giant came up with some screenshots of the solution. According to them, the shots show the game running on an actual Windows Phone 7 device, which is the cause of the images being blurry. “We hope to get some video and in depth information about how this team went about building their app as they prepare to head to Poland,” the aforementioned blog post continues.
The contest had two runner ups, including Tselina, a team of four from Indonesia, and Hypo Team, a team of 4 from TAR college in Malaysia. The former presented a comic book reader in Silverlight, with rich graphics and great navigation features, which made the solution seem very appealing. The team will receive USD4000, along with a Windows Phone for each member. As for Hypo Team, they came up with a game written in XNA, again with appealing graphics, and with a nice interface. They will receive USD3000, and a Windows Phone device for each member.
A wide range of other applications impressed too, and a series of other shots published over at the Windows Phone Developer Blog show exactly that.