Windows Phone 7 – Emulator keyboard shortcuts

The Windows Phone 7 emulator has a number of shortcut keys that are good to know about:

The hardware keyboard can be toggled by pressing the Pause key, or opened / closed via the Page Up / Page Down key. The hardware keyboard closes the software one, so you can only use on at a time. When the hardware keyboard is open, a little icon is displayed on the top of the screen:

F1 on the keyboard equals to pressing the back button on the phone.

Pressing the F2 or the Windows key while the emulator has focus acts as if the phone’s Windows key was pressed. Continuously pressing it for a while brings up the voice command / search interface.

F3 works as the third physical button on the phone, bring up the Bing search.

F7 is wired to the physical camera button.

F9 and F10 raise and lower the volume. Pressing these brings up an interesting piece of UI, for controlling the currently playing music or radio, and switching the phone to vibrate.

F11 acts as the play / pause button. It is interesting that such a button is in the emulator as this button is not a required hardware button for Windows Phone 7 (WP7).