Microsoft announced the long-awaited details of its Windows Mobile 7 operating system at a press conference held today at the annual Mobile World Conference in Barcelona. Phones using the OS will be available in time for the 2010 holiday season, CEO Steve Ballmer said. Beyond the timing, three points particularly stood out in the 90-minute presentation by Ballmer and top mobile executives. First, Ballmer emphasized that with Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is taking on more accountability for user experience--a key complaint of many Windows Mobile users. Second, the "premier launch partner" for Windows 7 phones in the United States is none other than Apple iPhone partner AT&T. And third, and perhaps most intriguingly, the new mobile OS will offer full integration with Microsoft's Xbox Live gaming platform.

Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 series operating system will integrate with its Xbox Live gaming platform.

Microsoft has been losing market share in the smart phone OS business, while operating systems more tailored to the mobile experience, such as Android and iPhone OS, have been gaining ground. The company is well aware of the problem; during an interview at CES 2010 in January, Robbie Bach, the president of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division, said, "I think the number one thing that we have to do on Windows Mobile going forward is about the experience people had with the phone itself. ...[O]ur experience is very skewed towards business users, and it's not as modern as it needs to be. And I'll just be as straightforward as that."

The OS that Microsoft unveiled Monday under the Windows Phone 7 series banner is geared to address the user experience complaints head-on. The company is dictating more integration between hardware and software than has been seen in any previous Windows Mobile device. In fact, Microsoft worked with Qualcomm to develop a new chip that will drive every Windows 7 phone, and for the first time, it will not allow mobile operators to create customized versions of the user interface. It has also dictated specific aspects of the device design, including minimum screen resolution, accelerometer and compass characteristics, and four-point multitouch-capable screens. In addition, all Windows 7 phones will have three buttons on the front: "start," "search," and "back."

That said, phone makers and mobile service providers will still be able to offer an array of different hardware and services to customers. Windows 7 phones may have physical keyboards or not, or be different size, said Andy Lees, senior vice president of Microsoft's Mobile Communications Business. "One size does not fit all," he added. With this strategy, Microsoft seems to have chosen to walk a fine line between the Apple and Google approaches to mobile, embracing both Apple's almost total control over user experience and Google's efforts to quickly scale adoption by working with multiple partners.

Joe Belfiore, vice president of Windows Phone, demonstrated the series 7 OS running on prototype hardware live on stage. Belfiore is a veteran of designing user interfaces, having worked on the UIs for Windows 95, Windows XP, the Zune media player, and Windows Media Center. At the press conference, he said that his team attempted to design a user experience different from the PC metaphor for the new OS, once specific to the way people use smart phones that allows them to organize information and applications in a task-centric way.

Based solely on the on-stage demo, they appear to have succeeded. The large icons ("Live Tiles") that appear on the phone's start page organize tasks in an intuitive way, and users can customize the icons to center around either tasks (such as e-mailing, or a specific Web page) or people (linking directly from the start page to all the information available about a specific contact). And while Microsoft is definitely late to the contextual menu part, the links to various tasks and applications that Belfiore showed on different screens seemed both more intuitive and more thorough than many available in either iPhone or Android applications. The proof, of course, won't be available for several months--and Apple and Google have a long time to improve their own mobile operating systems in the meantime.

A lot of features of Windows 7 Phones will be old hat to iPhone users; for instance, all series 7 phones will be Zune HD players, allowing users to play music and videos from their phones. Microsoft is also abandoning the Windows Mobile Device Center; Windows 7 Phones will sync to PCs through the Zune interface (iPhone/iTunes, anyone?).

One standout on the new mobile OS, however, is the "Hub" approach, which collects all applications related to a specific area in one place. For instance, the Music Hub allows users not only to play albums they have stored on the phone but also integrates third-party applications, giving users direct access, for instance, to their personalized Pandora stations while they're already listening to a stored song.
In an effort to better integrate users' personal lives with their business applications, Windows Phone 7 provides access not only to e-mail, appointments, and contacts from a corporate Outlook Exchange server, but also information from Web e-mail services such as Yahoo and Hotmail, social networking sites such as Facebook, and any information stored on Microsoft's Windows Live cloud service. When you touch a contact's name in the People Hub, you can not only call, text, or e-mail that person (a la the iPhone), you can also instantly view her social networking updates and new photos that she's posted online.

The Web browser is also the most capable of any Microsoft has included in its mobile OS--finally catching up to Apple's and Google's mobile browsers. Based on the code for Internet Explorer's desktop version, it also has subpixel font positioning for clearer text on a phone's tiny screen. And with the super-customizable start screen, you can even pin a specific Web page to the phone's start page, not just the browser's opening screen. Notably, though, the first version of Windows Phone 7 will not include Flash support--though Ballmer made a point of saying that Microsoft is not in any way opposed to Adobe Flash, indicating that its exclusion from version one may be related to the effort to get phones running the new OS on the shelves in time for Christmas.

The integration between Windows Phone 7 and Microsoft Office looks terrific, as expected. The full suite is available on the phone, including One Note; users can add new notes using the keypad, with the phone's camera, or by voice. In addition to syncing documents to an individual PC, the OS also offers connection to Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration tools, either via a corporate server or the Windows Live cloud service.

But to me, the biggest differentiator for Windows Phone 7 is the Gaming Hub. Belfiore commented on explosion of gaming, particularly on phones. A report released by analysts at Pyramid Research in August 2009, predicted that the mobile gaming market will reach $18 billion by 2014. Microsoft hopes to tap into that market--currently dominated by Apple's App Store--by fully integrating the new mobile OS with its Xbox Live platform. Windows Phone 7 users will be able to interact with people playing games on other phones, PCs, and Xbox consoles. Incorporating Xbox gaming into Windows phones may also help stem the gaming console's predicted slide into third place, behind Nintendo's Wii and Sony's PS3. (The Xbox 360 is currently in second place, with about 29 percent of U.S. and European market share.)

Of course, nothing is certain until phones show up in the stores, but it will be fascinating to see how first developers and then consumers react to Microsoft's attempt to reposition itself in the mobile device marketplace. Windows Phone 7 seems like a well thought-out and nicely designed operating system, but it has a lot of work to do to catch up with Apple and Android.

Google officially released the next version of Android today, bringing what appears to be some solid evolution to the mobile platform.

New features for Android 2.0 include useful-looking improvements to the way contacts can be accessed. Developers can play with the platform now, but the first device expected to have it is the Motorola Droid, which is slated for release in November.

A Google operating system, called Google Chrome OS, is on the way, the web giant announced last night. The open-source operating system will be an extension of the Chrome browser and will initially be targeted at netbooks. The first devices running the Chrome OS will be released in the second half of 2010, Google says.

The new operating system isn't just Windows-by-Google. It's Google's answer to the question of how the Internet and the desktop ought to relate. Technology has come a long way from when the browser was just another desktop application and Google has worked hard to encourage the use of Web applications, creating, for example, Google Docs, which emphasizes the ease of collaboration. Technologies such as Google Gears allow Web applications to run even offline, bringing them back to the desktop.

With Chrome OS, the company unveils a vision of the computer and the Internet being one and the same. Google believes this will solve many of the problems that consumers have with their computers today. The post on Chrome OS says:

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear -- computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.

Google's plan seems to be to address these issues removing much of what currently resides below the browser. A computer can continue to run quickly, for example, if it's not weighted down by more installed applications and stored files.

I'm fascinated in particular by the mention of configuring hardware. There are a lot of drivers out there to make devices work with Microsoft Windows, while Apple deals with this issue by maintaining fanatic control over the devices that connect to its operating system. Google seems to be suggesting that the Web could become the link between a user's computer and other devices.

This is right on trend. Two weeks ago, for example, HP announced the Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web, an Internet-connected printer that can access Websites directly through applications. I can imagine how Internet-connected devices could lighten the load on the operating system a great deal, allowing the user to interact with them through Web pages. There would certainly be issues with security, but I think this is the direction that would allow a stripped-down operating system focused on the Web to really take off.