A Windows Phone 7 application that goes above and beyond - All the way to the outer atmosphere

Dr Andras Sobester from Southampton University and team launched a Windows Phone 7 into the upper atmospheres using a helium ballon.  "We are collecting data which will then plug in to various atmospheric
science projects, monitoring pollutants such as volcanic ash for example, and
informing the science behind modelling the climate and earth system in
general."  The HTC 7 Trophy was used to log scientific data and to demonstrate the use of low-powered, light-weight commodity embedded device as a data logger.  Microsoft Windows Azure was used as the back-end computing resource that the phone communicated and had its data interpreted.

During the phone's mission, it reached a maximum altitude of 18,237 meters during its 1h 16' flight.  The phone sent its location coordinates to Azure server when it was in a GSM frequency range.  The future is bright for the team as further missions will include external instruments linked to WP7 via Bluetooth stack.  The WP7/Azure combination will form the trajectory modeling system for future missions.  More information about the project may be found here:  

ASTRA (Atmospheric Science Through Robotic Aircraft) initiative - https://www.soton.ac.uk/~astra/