Windows 7 Phone
October 21st, 2010, 7:38am by JakeSeems like it needs its own post. Breaking free from the apps-on-a-grid interface paradigm that Apple & everyone else stole from the ‘ole Palm OS, Windows 7 looks to be the first really original phone interface to hit the market in quite a while. The best of the devices, the Omnia 7, gets a solid 8/10 from Engadget, while the OS itself gets a good but not great review:
It still feels like the company is a good year behind market leaders right now, and though it’s clear the folks in Redmond are doing everything they can to get this platform up to snuff, it’s also clear that they’re not there yet.
So where does WinPho (rhymes with info) rank amongst the smartphone platforms? With iOS, Android, webOS, Meego, Symbian, Blackerry OS 6, Blackberry Tablet OS, webOS, Windows Mobile and probably a couple I’m missing, it’s getting to be a crowded. Will there be even 3 survivors?
October 21st, 2010 at 10:47 am
My prediction: Android and Microsoft will end up battling for market share. Android will be more consumer-focused, and Microsoft will take over from RIM on the business side, and make inroads into the consumer market as well. Apple will do what Apple does — provide a unified experience that ends up at 10-20% market share and makes them a ton of money.
The rest will languish and finally disappear, if they haven’t already. There’s no room in the martketplace for innovative, interesting OSes that aren’t commercially successful — just ask the BeOS, OS/2, and all the other computer OSes littering the history of the field.
October 21st, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Minor niggles aside, I think WP7 has all sorts of appeal. I really miss the Today screen of my WinMob phones, and these tiles seem functiinally similar. Whatever issues remain (backgrounding apps, copy/paste, suspending apps instead of quitting in sleep), I feel optimistic that Microsoft will fix. When I first got my Pre, it wouldn’t connect to my Exchange server, and that didn’t stop me!
I’m not sure I agree with Mike that the smartphone OS wars will necessarily play out like they did on the PC. The fact that anyone is excited about WP7, despite the dominance of Apple and Googs, is some sort of evidence of that. Can you imagine launching a desktop OS today and have anyone care? I think smartphones will be more like the browser wars, where there are 5 or 6 credible options and they are more similar than different, and pretty much interchangeable. I mean, people have their preferences (Opera fans), and some people need certain extensions, but for the most part, they all meet minimal functionality needs and do the same things in slightly different ways. Even as mature as the browser wars were, Chrome came out of nowhere and took a chunk of the market, mostly because there’s no lock in. Now, of course, you could argue that mobile apps have the same kind of lock-in that programs had on the desktop, but I just don’t see it, when Angry Birds can be ported in less than a day, and almost all the development that matters is on the web.
November 8th, 2010 at 9:32 pm
Well, I went by an AT&T store today to check out the new WP7 launch, and I was pretty impressed. The 2 devices I played with (Focus and Surround) both seemed state-of-the-art, hardware-and industrial design-wise. I still have a problem with the color saturation on AMOLED screens like on the Focus (Surround has traditional LCD), but that’s just a matter of preference. Anyway, the OS is fast and responsive, easy to use and fun to navigate. It has unobtrusive text notifications but a full-screen, *decide now* screen for incoming calls. The browser was quick and responsive, but did not seem to be recognized as a mobile browser on sites like Flickr, probably because it’s not webkit.
Unfortunately, despite decent signage in the store (prominent window placement) and a relatively large dedicated kiosk, there did not seem to be anyone paying attention. Microsoft seems to have checked off all the necessary boxes:
1) tons of apps (nearly 2000 now) with lots of top tier names
2) state-of-the-art hardware
3) an OS that doesn’t suck and is relatively well-differentiated
4) tons of marketing spend
Despite this, is the launch going to be a complete failure? I hope this is not the fate that awaits all smartphones that launch without iOS and Android.
November 12th, 2010 at 8:32 pm
Logging in from a Windows 7 phone series7 phone or something. Seems like a reasonable copy of the iPhone with different iconic paradigm. Keyboard fine but man how do you type with half the screen covered with the soft keyboard. FWIE I’m using the much maligned surround.
November 12th, 2010 at 10:22 pm
I’ve been playing with Windows Phone 7 phones off and on all week, even think the Surround is pretty slick. Yes, there’s some features missing, but nothing that won’t get added in short order. Of course, i thought the same thing about the Pre. Just like the halycon days of June 2009, what’s appealing about a new platform is optimism and potential.
The fact that the soft keyboard leaves so little screen real estate for the text fields, etc is only problematic for touch typists. I’m pretty much looking at the keys as I type anyway, so the screen could be completely blocked for all I care. In fact, I barely even notice when the cursor scrolls off the screen on my Pre. I don’t know why precentral people complain about that so much 🙂
November 12th, 2010 at 11:04 pm
Played with a Win7 phone for the first time today, was pretty impressed. Nothing mind-blowing, but kinda fun to play with a different UI.
Also read that a jailbreak is imminent for Win7 Phone. That didn’t take long. Actually, after the 9000 Kins that they sold, MS is probably happy that anybody cares enough to jailbreak it.
November 13th, 2010 at 1:39 am
After fiddling with the settings for a few minutes, I figured out how to hard reset a WP7 back to factory conditions, so I added a few accounts (XBox Live, email, facebook). It’s pretty cool to your own pictures and avatar populate those live tiles. And WP7 does what I imagined Synergy would do when it was first announced. When you go to a contact, you are presented with all the ways you can communicate with them, email, call, write on their facebook wall. No Twitter DM yet, but it makes sense to eventually do that, too. No, none of this is groundbreaking stuff, but the presentation and implementation is commendable.
November 17th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
The word I was looking for was “emboldened.” Knowing how to factory reset the phone emboldened me to add accounts that I could later delete.
Anyway, wanted to report that the photos app is great on WP7, like iPhone great. There’s no rendering lag whatsoever when swiping from photo to photo.