Starting a new site build today I was adding in the usual favicons and apple touch icons, and I started to wonder if Windows Phone 7 has a similar feature. Since Rich got his shiny new Nokia Lumia 800 with Mango this is a hot topic. From the last time I looked into the various website icons for smartphones, I recall that Android will pick up the apple touch icon link and use that, so we checked if WP7 would behave the same. When browsing a site, under the “…” button, there’s a “Pin to Start” option. When you choose it, just just takes a snapshot of the upper two thirds of the current screen. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be an alternative to this at the moment as they haven’t implemented anything similar to the “apple-touch-icon” link. The only option to get a nice tile for your site appears to be the route Google took: create a new page (or div) with a background and SVG that’s just for WP7 users. Their approach is innovative and looks great on the screen, if perhaps not entirely practical for the rest of it. It’s nicely written up here: Creating a pinnable Windows Phone 7 tile for your website like Google by Russell Beattie
Atelier Web Design & Other Mischief
