A Windows phone

Says industry expert

Yesterday we brought you news that Kinect will receive an official Microsoft controller with buttons in the form of a hook-up between the sensor and phones running Windows Phone 7. As Microsoft announced little of its concrete plans for the two, we turned to mobile expert Keith Andrew, News Editor at PocketGamer.biz, to look to the future for the two devices.

Andrew's prediction for the collaboration? That it will focus on multiplayer experiences such as the Rally Ball demonstration shown in Microsoft's initial announcement, as creating single-player content exclusively for owners of Kinect and WP7 would cause problems.

In theory, it could be some use in slower games – adventure titles or RPGs – if they employ Kinect in some fashion. It's not hard to imagine the phone's screen being employed to take part in some sort of QTE mini-game. However, then you have the problem of what to do with folks who don't have a Windows Phone, which means you either block them out completely – which is never going to happen – or make said parts of the game playable on a controller.

That means any employment of the phone would be merely token, or would take the form of non-essential bonus rounds. Not amazingly appealing.

As well as predicting a multiplayer-driven future for the two, Andrew also sees the devices' media capabilities playing a big role in how the partnership evolves in future. In much the same way iPad and iPhone can be linked to Apple TV, WP7 and Kinect could be used for remote media streaming and for sharing digital content.

The addition of a touchscreen controller to the Kinect experience has plenty of other potential applications, but which device stands to gain most from this collaboration: the hands-free Kinect or the Windows Phone 7? Andrew believes it's the latter:

However, all that said, I think this link up is likely to benefit Windows Phone far more than it does Kinect. From a mobile perspective, Windows Phone has been a big critical hit – the UI surpasses anything else out there – but its sales certainly aren't up to the level of iPhone or Android yet. By linking it up to Kinect, there's a chance Xbox 360 owners will be tempted to give Windows Phone a try, given Kinect's userbase already outnumbers it by about 4:1.

What do you think the future holds for these two devices?