Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/11/microsoft-launches-windows-phone-7-but-does-anyone-care/

by stevefink • 16 years ago

42 68 16 years ago

techcrunch.com

jeroen• 16 years ago

the article is at http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/10/11/microsoft-launches-wi...

vyrotek• 16 years ago

I care. I actually want to try one out and hopefully get rid of my android phone.

I must admit though, I'm mostly excited to write mobile apps in C# and use XNA.

makecheck• 16 years ago

That article seemed incredibly long for something that failed to tell me even a single thing about the phone, aside from it "looking great" or something. Come on.

Though in a way, it almost doesn't matter. Microsoft has to offer the features of iPhone and Android to even be taken seriously, so we have to assume that is just there. What they really need can't be seen through promising text and screenshots, anyway: they really need polish.

Microsoft has been notoriously bad about leaving all kinds of holes in their products, so that they look OK on stage but end up feeling clunky as hell. If they are to have a chance this time, it is important that their phones feel simple and logical; and, dare I say it, they should even be a joy to use. Microsoft will never earn my respect until they can prove that they get this, and deliver it.

samstokes• 16 years ago

Microsoft haven't launched a phone. They've launched a new version of their phone OS.

gte910h5• 16 years ago

Tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment.

Neither Google nor Apple have offered many of these people what they want in a dev environment. Apple's required an odd language up until very recently, and even the C# language you can write to doesn't do many of the things they're used to doing C# in.

Android's development resources are capable, but Eclipse is a far cry from Visual Studio...

I assume tons of people will flock to the Win7 Phones unless they are just horrible once they get going.

Many game companies can target this platform much more easily than the iPhone/Android handsets as it also works off XNA.

glhaynes3• 16 years ago

Many game companies can target this platform much more easily than the iPhone/Android handsets as it also works off XNA.

Seems like its lack of OpenGL offsets that a good bit... yes, a lot of Xbox/Windows games will be easy to port, but it seems like more ports will likely to be coming from iPhone/Android.

glhaynes3• 16 years ago

Following up to myself here: this could have some interesting benefits for Microsoft, too — iPhone has the most/best games right now, but Android is selling a ton of units so lots of folks are thinking about porting their iPhone games to Android. If WP7 was the inverse of what it is (if it had OpenGL and no XNA), it'd be seen as the third platform, something to maybe, possibly consider porting to once you'd ported to Android. That doesn't seem desirable at all. At least with XNA, they'll have the possibility of getting a lot of different games than what is available on iPhone and Android... some differentiation, which is exactly what they need.

tomh-2• 16 years ago

The tools don't matter, it might be nice, but even though "tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment" I can't recall the last time they produced a product having superior user experience thanks to those tools. I can't name a single website/webapp/desktop app that I enjoy using on a daily base made with visual studio. I know a lot of the game companies use visual studio (c++) to produce parts of their games, but I'm not sure which of the latest games are produced using XNA.

My point is the tools don't matter as much as the strategy and decisions of Microsoft in other parts of the ecosystem to attract talent to produce content for their devices.

bananaandapple• 16 years ago

I use windows 7 on a daily basis and I enjoy it! And I bet it's made with visual studio.

kenjackson6• 16 years ago

Zune desktop client? Media Center? Windows Live Writer? Camtasia? Visual Studio?

TheIronYuppie2• 16 years ago

Sorry, totally disagree. Tools matter. A LOT. Being able to build my LOB app in VB and launch on a company's phones = huge win for IT Departments.

The world isn't all about consumers and flash. Whether or not they can win that market is an open question, but they'll make a dent. And Blackberry has built a very successful business doing just that (doing ok with consumers and crushing enterprise)

gte910h5• 16 years ago

StackOverflow.com?

frou_dh• 16 years ago

That's the thing. Even if ObjC/Xcode is in fact inferior to C#/VS, it hasn't stopped talented iPhone and Mac developers from creating great apps.

acconrad• 16 years ago

Not only is this article poorly written, but all of the subsequent TechCrunch articles suck as well. As Homer Simpson once said, "You take forever to say nothing."

eogas• 16 years ago

I think it's fantastic. As someone who has done a decent bit of iPhone development, I can definitely say that I prefer developing in VS with C# than XCode with Objective-C.

It's disheartening that so many bloggers are dismissing this awesome platform simply because Microsoft is "late to the game", yet they forget how successful Android has been. At this point, it looks like Google and Microsoft are fresh and new, whereas Apple is trying to prolong the life of an old platform.

cpr• 16 years ago

While I might agree that the Obj-C language is long in the tooth, iOS/Cocoa Touch is really a new platform that sprung from the ashes of the aging Cocoa.

The iOS folks got to start from near scratch, building on the foundation they already knew so well.

And I'd say they did a pretty great job.

simonsarris• 16 years ago

> It's disheartening that so many bloggers are dismissing this awesome platform simply because Microsoft is "late to the game", yet they forget how successful Android has been.

Not only that, but I recall dismissing Xbox because Microsoft was so late to the game for video-game consoles that I thought they couldn't possibly have any impact.

Boy, how wrong I was...

mikeryan2• 16 years ago

I think the fear for Windows being "late to the game" isn't that MS will have a hard time getting mindshare, but I think they are going to have a hard time getting "developer share".

Basically if I'm going to develop my hip new mobile app that's ready to take over the world I'm going to start with Android and iPhone and wait and see what OS I'm going to tackle next, and the way I'm going to figure that out is by sales numbers and right now even there are more Palm devices then WP7.

gaustin• 16 years ago

>I think the fear for Windows being "late to the game" isn't that MS will have a hard time getting mindshare, but I think they are going to have a hard time getting "developer share".

Microsoft already have huge developer mindshare. All they have to do is get developers that already use their platforms to use yet another of their platforms.

dinedal2• 16 years ago

The real question is, is this the next Xbox, or is it the next Silverlight?

bad_user• 16 years ago

It's not you, the developer, that's important. The customers buying the phones are.

Regular people already know about Android / iPhone. There are already cheap Android phones on sale (you can buy an unlocked Android phone, with no contract, for $300 ... see HTC Wildfire).

And many people are buying these phones for the apps available. For consumers the iPhone is king. Android is playing catch-up (but it is doing OK).

And speaking about regular people, my wife owns a WinMo 6.5 phone that will not see an official upgrade to 7 because it doesn't have the right hardware. And all apps for WinMo 6.x will have to suffer complete rewrites. So all the developers working on WinMo 6.x apps have just been fucked.

> At this point, it looks like Google and Microsoft are fresh and new, whereas Apple is trying to prolong the life of an old platform.

That's new to me, considering the iPhone 4 is still the best smartphone out there.

luffy• 16 years ago

I'm currently working on several applications for WP7. The development experience for WP7 is a million-billion times better than it was for past Windows Mobile operating systems.

- The emulator is snappy and you don't need to mess around with ActiveSync.

- I'm not a huge fan of the XAML (the Silverlight/WPF markup language), but that is not an issue. I put a XAML place holder element in place and add controls in C#

- The built in controls look great and are surprisingly functional. I specifically thinking of the Panorama control - which allows application content to basically flow off screen. Some may find that style of having content get cut off by the edge of the display off-putting, but its effective if that truncated content is limited to titles.

- putting XNA in there is great, mostly for familiarity's sake. You still have to design for the phone differences (form factor, input, and library). Porting games over from XBox live probably won't require an enormous app-rewrite. Can't wait to see how this particular piece plays out.

The one drawback I can see has to do with Windows Phone store. I'm not really sure what the story is there. Is app distribution really limited to the store? How about enterprise apps?

I don't have experience developing iPhone or Android apps, so I won't comment on whether or not WP7 is better in that department.

steverb2• 16 years ago

My limited number of contacts at MS tell me that an Enterprise deployment solution is coming, but they couldn't get it done in time for the initial release.

I hope it's better than Apple's solution.

allwein• 16 years ago

What problems do you have with Apple's Enterprise deployment solution?

jf• 16 years ago

Yeah ... app distribution is really limited to the store.

(PS: Send me an email? Would love to hear what you're working on)

kenjackson6• 16 years ago

If you're writing a link-bait article about if anyone cares about a device the day the devices are announced... that means people care. :-)

recoiledsnake• 16 years ago

He even says 'eagerly awaited Windows Phone 7' to describe something that supposedly no one cares about.

mmastrac• 16 years ago

Microsoft's Kin failure is still in the back of my mind. What's to say they won't kill this one too? Why take the development risk?

kenjackson6• 16 years ago

Big differences. MS is betting big on this, whereas with Kin it was a small team that did it. Kin apparently had very little internal support. Kin wasn't pushed by MS, but had a contractual obligation with Verizon. That's why Kin launched on one carrier only. Apparently WP7 is launching on 60 carriers, with 9 or 10 different phones. The mobile, VS, Silverlight, XBox, Zune, and Office teams are all apparently very engaged.

MS won't kill this. I wouldn't let that be a factor on doing development. Now it may take a while for it to get consumer uptake. That may temper if you want to develop for it. But given that this device should sell moderately well with a good app store, it may have better ROI than the same app showing up in the Android app store, even with the larger number of Android devices.

maguay• 16 years ago

This time for Microsoft, it's win or die trying. And they know that.

rbarooah• 16 years ago

I hope it succeeds at least enough to give Apple some competition in development tools.

Samuel_Michon2• 16 years ago

Apple doesn't need competition to motivate them. They've shown that by reinventing the iPod every year even though there's no competition to speak of. If anything, Apple is obsessive about innovating.

There's a major new version of the dev environment underway, Xcode 4, which developers can already try for themselves: http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats-new.html

desigooner• 16 years ago

I am a big fan of the UI. Snappy and minimalist. I know that Windows Phone has music enabled in the background through the hub api for apps like Pandora and Slacker, etc. All it needs is Copy/Paste (early 2011) and reasonable multitasking capabilities atleast for certain apps. I think the most use of Multi tasking for me on the iPhone right now is to toggle certain settings or to do certain stuff during navigation. I don't really use it beyond that and it's reasonable that most of the multitasking is done this way.

I've also played around with the Google Nexus One and the HTC Incredible. While they're great phones in their own right, the touch screen experience leaves a lot to be desired (atleast on those units) in terms of response time and accuracy + the camera on nexus one is nowhere near the iphone 3GS, forget iPhone 4.

Disclaimer: I have been using the iPhone since the past 3 years and currently on the iPhone 4. I think it's time that I tried a new platform because I'm simply bored of how the phone looks and how it operates (launch an app, exit an app, etc. for everything). I like the way multitasking is implemented and how well the camera performs. I've always had the craving for a hardware keyboard and it seems like the new Dell phone with WP7 is a good replacement for my phone, probably early next year.

amcl• 16 years ago

I care. Competition is always good, regardless of whether I'd ever buy one or not.

drdaeman• 16 years ago

I've heard WP7 has no compatibility whatsoever (so it's unable to run even WM5/6 apps)? If that's true — am I understanding properly that MS is introducing almost completely empty platform, which requires software to be written yet?

I don't know whenever they will succeed or not, but it seems to be a hard task to enter the market when all rivals already have quite strong positions (including lots of software).

potatolicious• 16 years ago

If anything I think that's the move they needed most - to toss everything out and start new.

See for example: OS9 vs. OSX

The problem with MS, constantly, is that they have prioritized backwards compatibility over just about everything else - often usability, stability, and functionality. This has kept their platforms technologically backwards and their usability an infamous joke.

It's about time that MS started fresh with a modern, relevant platform. I just hope they can do something similar with desktop Windows.

daeken3• 16 years ago

I'd love to see it happen, but it's not looking great at this point, at least for the near future. It's entirely possible that the Midori project is continuing behind closed doors, but Singularity (the kernel and base runtime) has entirely stagnated from what I've seen. Since they're already working with an open source (if not Free) base, I wonder if they won't just pick up one of the pure-managed OS projects out there and use that (e.g. Cosmos, Renraku, SharpOS, etc).

Disclosure: I'm the project lead for Renraku, so I have a bit of a vested interest in seeing that happen.

Samuel_Michon2• 16 years ago

I think that's the move they needed most - to toss everything out and start new.

I wholeheartedly agree, and from everything that I've seen of WP7, I'm impressed. MS has rethought the entire UI, and frankly, rebuilding from scratch was the only thing they could do to become relevant again in the consumer mobile space. They've done away with the desktop metaphor, menu bars and contextual menus, and yet they managed not to make it a carbon copy of iOS or WebOS. I can't wait to test it.

However, just a side note about your comparison between OS9>OSX and WM6>WP7: whenever there was a radical change in architecture, Apple provided a transition period where the two coexisted. When Apple switched from 68k processors to PowerPC, developers could build FAT Binaries that would run on both platforms. When Apple switched from MacOS 9 to OS X, MacOS 9 apps could still run within the Classic environment. When Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel processors, PowerPC applications could still be run within a layer called Rosetta.

gte910h5• 16 years ago

Having seen the cf that was Window 6, et al, they couldn't have made a smarter move.

TheIronYuppie2• 16 years ago

I'm with the crew that thinks it's pretty short sighted to just dismiss this out of hand. Last time I checked, Xbox launched into a market place where people change their consoles a lot less frequently, with a single ENORMOUS player, and they've done pretty well for themselves.

The question is whether or not they get the amazing partnerships with HW/SW that Apple has driven into the iPhone and let them crush design. Without that, it'll be good, but not great and will not win the hipsters/design freaks.

runjake• 16 years ago

The initial reviews have been great (even from Apple fanatics like Gruber, Mossberg, and Pogue). The WP7 development environment is great and utilizes APIs with a wealth of existing experience out there.

Sure they were late to the game, but from what I can see, they'll already become a player. The same dismissals were issued against Microsoft for other late-comers-that-became-hits like the XBOX series, Active Directory, and .NET.

daeken3• 16 years ago

I hate to say this, especially as an avid .NET fanboy, but I feel they missed a huge opportunity here. If they would have layered a pure-managed userspace on top of the CE kernel, they could've achieved extremely high performance (shared GC and seriously diminished task switching/IPC overhead) while guaranteeing a huge degree of security at compile-time. In addition, they could've much more easily moved the whole system to be orthogonally persistent, which I believe will play a big roll in the mobile space as tablets get more advanced, particularly.

The benefits of the OS being able to introspect completely on the applications running on it simply can't be overstated. From a security, stability, speed, memory use, and flexibility point of view, they missed the mark. It'd also open up a lot of new avenues in terms of parallelism, which will be a big deal in a few years as we get dual- and quad-core mobile chips. They're coming, and yet again we're not ready for them.

I sincerely hope they go the pure-managed-userspace angle for WP8. If they do, they'll have a tech stack that simply can't be beaten.

(Note: I'm a bit biased here, being the author of a pure-managed OS. But seriously -- these guys really started the trend, why are they not taking full advantage of it? They're already going mostly-managed...)

loire280• 16 years ago

The worst news about this phone is the web browser: IE7 based with IE8 technology. IE7's still-buggy, slow rendering; glacial Javascript performance; no support for forward-thinking web technologies ("HTML5", canvas or webGL, CSS3). I hope this doesn't take off, or this will ruin the currently fun, Webkit-based mobile web development for modern smartphones..

Also, from a user's perspective: no Flash (at least initially) OR HTML5 video tag support? It's like Microsoft's totally missed the last few years of mobile phone flamewars.

kenjackson6• 16 years ago

In head to head comparison, the WP7 browser, in preproduction HW, performed about on par with Android (Nexus One) and iPhone 4 browsers.

I'm sure that with IE9, they'll rev the phone with an HTML5 focused browser in the future. But for todays web, I think a solid IE7/8 browser is something I'm completely fine with. At least for a year or so.

Anechoic• 16 years ago

Will WP7 phones sync out-of-the-box with Macs?

usaar333• 16 years ago

Don't believe so. Nor can you mount the media drive (as with Android). As a Linux user, this'll keep me far away from Win7 phones (as it did with iphones)

16s• 16 years ago

One aspect of the Windows phone that may be a big hit in corporations and governments is whole device encryption. PGP (now owned by Symantec) can deploy strong encryption to these Windows phones. Apple has always been difficult to develop for in this area (lots of frequent changes ISP can't keep up) and they tend to advertise to home users and I'm not sure about Android's whole device encryption ability.

DjDarkman• 16 years ago

Give me a reason to care. Previous Windows Mobiles were crap and I am waiting to see how is it better in any way than Android and iOS.

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