Maciej Grabek

According to Nokia Lumia 610 announcement at Mobile World Congress, at Microsoft Download there is now available Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 CTP.

Windows Phone is going to be delivered on less powered devices (cheaper CPU and 256MB RAM). System is optimized so it will deal with those reduced resources, but Microsoft want’s all developers to think about that and deliver fully optimized apps for each device. In this there are available couple new features:

Two Windows Phone Emulator images available after SDK update. One (default) with 512MB RAM and second with 256MB RAM. This is available on drop down list as below:

New API

When we want to discover on which device type our application is running then we need to use code as below:

try
{
	Int64 result = (Int64)DeviceExtendedProperties.GetValue("ApplicationWorkingSetLimit");
	if (result < 94371840L)
		// IsLowMemDevice = true;
	else
	{
		// IsLowMemDevice = false;
	}
}
catch (ArgumentOutOfRangeException)
{
	// Windows Phone OS update not installed, which indicates a 512-MB device.
}

This condition is connected with current maximum aloved memory limit which is 90MB. In device running on 256MB this is to much to be sure that all features of Windows Phone platform can run without any problems.
Keep it in your mind and prepare your apps to run on all devices – if it can be needed just reduce clock time in your game or use less memory consuming operations / resources
You can find more at MSDN.