Over on the official Windows Phone Blog, Mike Battisa talks about the optimisation that developers will need to consider for the 256MB devices such as the Nokia Lumia 610. As noted previously, around 5% of apps in the Marketplace will need some changes, but the point of articles like this is to get developers thinking about the needs and requirements as they start new projects.

Hopefully developers won't look on this as a "program for the lowest common denominator" and make everything work on 256MB and 512MB devices simply by coding to the more restrictive limit, but that must be a consideration. A lot of the advice should carry through though, for example look to minimise start-up time, careful use of the event handler, and UI response times.

The guidance for optimizing for lower cost Windows Phones is largely the same as for optimizing for today’s generation of devices. Apps that follow performance best practices today will run well across all devices without much effort. Apps that perform adequately today may perform noticeably slower on lower-cost devices. To ensure your app performs well on lower cost devices as well as today’s devices, consider the following principles.

It's going to be interesting to see how this works in the real world when the devices arrive. For the developers who are reading, what are your plans to address the issue, and what do users want to see?