Do you want a Windows Phone 7?
by Volker Weber
I have been watching this Windows Phone 7 space since Microsoft announced it in Barcelona in February. It takes guts to start all over, and to announce it months in advance, rendering your current line of products obsolete.
Today, Microsoft announced availability in many countries for next Thursday. I will probably have one on Tuesday or so. And I am really looking forward to trying it out. Forget the silly cut&paste drama. The UX is quite slick. When you look at some of the screens, for instance the inbox, you only see five mails. Tell you what, I only see five on my iPhone as well. My Torch shows seven, so does the N8. While the interface looks wasteful on pictures, it may prove to be nice when you touch it. So I am completely open.
I do hope that Microsoft is equally open. If they only tie this phone into their own services, like Nokia initially tried with Ovi, I am going to drop it really quickly. But if it does live with GMail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Twitter and Facebook, then why not?
Funny ad, btw:
Comments
from what i seen from a LG device it looks very nice in real life (that was a late beta unit a MS employee was using)
But the killer will be apps and how much the OEM will mess up the platform.
time will tell , from mail/calender alone ill buy it , we will know in a few weeks
From here it looks like Microsoft takes a hint from Apple. No Sense on the HTC for instance.
I actually think this thing could do pretty well, if not with consumers then definitely within business. The Outlook client looks to have a lot of "enterprisy" features and if they can get the .Net developer community on board, they should be set. Bespoke enterprise development is an area that I think RIM really dropped the ball on, both with their awful JDK and the introduction then the killing off of their MDS runtimes and toolset.
Can't wait to hear what you have to say! :-)
What does the ad say? "Windows Phone 7 is so boring, all this would not happen if you have one?" :)
Till now it looks pretty good. But the main suspicion is if you really can rush a new OS in such a short time. They announced it not even a year ago.
But MS at least deserves credit for trying to make the UI different from the others.
Can't quite get what that ad is trying to say. As Marc says, either this phone is so dull you wont have any problem putting it down, or else its so addictive that you'll wreck your relationships, parenting, wedding etc by using it.
Either way, not terribly desirable outcomes.
As for the mobile OS - we currently have four major mobile platforms (RIM, Apple, Android and Nokia) - I'm not convinced there is room for another to compete successfully... Still, if anyone can, I guess its M$ with their billions of spare cash.
Stuart, did you by any chance forget Windows Mobile?
Doesn't play in any customer I work with, nor do I know anyone that still owns a WinMobile phone... Do you see different?
I've seen a live demo on beta device and the interface was smooth and slick.
The concept of different hubs is quite nice, but I'm not convinced.
The demo app could i.e. push its background sound to the music hub and be launched right from the music history. A total mess, just imagine Quake and a NIN album on the same device.
Stuart, do all your customers have Lotus products and what does that mean for the overall market?
Using an iPhone I must admit that I like the new UI approach. Rather like the idea to get focused on tasks not apps.
@Vowe I don't pretend to talk for the whole market ;-)
I'm genuinely interested in others' view of the market - is M$ still a serious player?
Stuart, that was implied in my question. ;-)
I know of an awful lot of small businesses based on Windows, Exchange, and Windows Mobile (in fact, for offices of around 5 - 10 it seems to be the de facto set-up), and Windows Phone 7 will be of great interest.
One thing: is it just me, or does “Windows Phone 7” sound really awkward?
I don't get the point: What is really new? What is really different? Or even better?
The tails are very ugly from my point of view, they are wasting loads of space on the screen. Is it really better to scroll horizontal on the launcher (W7P, BlackBerry) instead of having pages/cards (iOs, WebOS)? Its only a me-too product.
The PalmPre had some really innovative features (Contact/Facebook integration, Thumbstone, Wifi Hotspot) and was not a real big success.
