On of our readers, Kevin B, created a simple video player for us to try running in the Windows Phone 7 Emulator in Visual Studio. He found that he was able to keep the video playing in the background while he poked around in other areas of the phone. We were able to recreate this, as shown in the video below. What’s going on here? Isn’t Windows Phone 7 Series not supposed to support multitasking for third-party apps? Yeah, we thought so. Our best guess is that the app is tapping into the native video player on the device, which does support multitasking (imagine starting a video in Zune, and coming back to the Start screen to check your email while the video continues to run).

Anyone want to try to explain this?