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 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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.