DirectX to survive in Windows Mobile 7 after all

There have been some talk of Microsoft phasing out DirectX for OpenGL on Windows Mobile handsets, but a recent job posts by the Windows Mobile team seem to suggest this will not be the case after all.

The post makes numerous references to DirectX in both its 2D and 3D version.

SENIOR Software Development Engineer (SDE) (705110 -External) Job

Date: Nov 18, 2009

Job Category: Software Engineering: Development
Location: United States, WA, Redmond
Product: Windows Mobile Devices
Division: Entertainment & Devices Division

Lead a team to deliver the graphics platform for Windows Mobile and grow it over future releases. Knowledge of DirectDraw, D2D, and D3D a must. Familiarity with display drivers and GPUs a plus. Must be able to debug complicated low level problems and analyze performance.
RID:862920

DirectX on Windows Mobile is a double edged sword.  While a good implementation on Windows Mobile would ease the porting of games from the desktop, the rest of the mobile world uses OpenGL, meaning porting for example iPhone or Android games would be more difficult.

Microsoft has however been doing some good work recently with using DirectX hardware acceleration for HTML rendering in IE9, so it may very well be that we are yet to see the full potential of the technology on our devices.

See the job posting here.