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Windows Mobile 7 Phone Release Delayed Again
jcoventry writes "Microsoft is delaying Windows Mobile 7, and it is thought new phones with the operating system are unlikely to reach the market before 2010. Microsoft partners who had expected to have a final release in their hands by early 2009 have been told that it won't be ready until the second half of 2009. Partners include companies like Verizon, Motorola and Samsung, all of which plan new phones that include the Mobile Windows 7 OS. Windows Mobile 7 is expected to have features like gesture recognition and speech input."
Apple, Google and RIM will be that much farther down the road.
Windows Mobile is dead.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
Screw gesture recognition, I just want MS to fix the crappiness that is the current-gen Windows Mobile OS and turn it into something that is usable.
On my HTC Apache (aka XV6700) which I personally upgraded to W.M.6 from the W.M.5 that came with it, and I still am sometimes not even able to answer a call; no matter how many times I try it will just register as missed. Sometimes this doesn't happen, but the call goes directly to speakerphone. That is lovely for the times when Mom calls and promptly does the mom thing when I am trying to pass myself off as a professional.
Switching from data calls to voice calls is a pain, and vice versa. IE Mobile sucks at rendering most pages, and makes it a total pain to do even the simplest of things. My backlight can randomly be switched completely off by some unknown mechanism. The phone is running at 520Mhz but always feels sluggish (and yes, I do completely close, not just minimize, all programs when I am finished with them). The list goes on and on.
I don't need fancy stuff like gesture recognition, I just want my phone to work the way it's supposed to. Hopefully Android can prove itself early on and I can switch to an HTC Dream.
I'm no iPhone fanboy but it seems ironic that after 6 iterations of Windows Mobile, Microsoft still hasn't released an update to handle gestures.
Before version 4, WinCE (which is the core of Windows Mobile) was unusable garbage. In version 4 it was upgraded to "terrible" (as an OS), and the source code became available to developers. Version 5 is the first version that didn't entirely blow (although I quit a job using WinCE for one using specifically not WinCE because it is still a shitty OS).
WinCE is not inherited from any of the other Windows lines, it doesn't share any code with them at the lower levels. The problem is that WinCE bolts the horrid Win32 API on top of this OS. And then MFC. And then dotnet. And it still retains much of the desktop+mouse user model. Every time I see that mouse arrow on a retail WinCE device it makes me cringe. For an embedded device, this makes no sense. Microsoft was more interested in maintaining compatibility with its desktop environment than with creating an interface that is logical for an embedded device.
Device manufacturers have given MS a kick in a pants. They told them that what is currently being produced is inadequate. After the iPhone came out, MS released WinCE 6, which is the same old stuff (ooh, now a process can use 64 megs of RAM instead of 32) with more dotnet. They came out with yesterday's product. HTC and Samsung had to revamp the UI totally to ship a competitive phone. Can you imagine the level of hackery that went into this? Will MS catch up? Up until now there was no competition to WinCE (Linux required too much work, Symbian was, well, Symbian, and iPhone OS is not available to anyone). But with Android, handset developers have a real alternative OS (yes, I know it's Linux, but it's a complete OS). If Google hadn't screwed up Android by tying it in so much to Google services, I would say MS is too late. As it is, we'll see.
Wow, Microsoft is really falling behind here.
Google has just released a prototype Android phone for review and Apple is still going strong with the iPhone.
I hope Google is able to push their OS hard enough to knock MS right out of the phone market. The last thing I want is a phone running a proprietary OS that is impossible to program for...
I think the best thing about the Android compared to other phone OS's is the open development. It can be programmed easily using well known and widely used languages, unlike the iPhone that requires Objective-C!
The fight will be between Google and the Open Source community in one corner, Apple and its traditional strength in human factors in the second corner, and the Koreans with their history of innovative phone products in the third corner. (I was in Seoul a year ago and I never saw so many different kinds of weird cell phone gadgets :-)
Although I'm pretty much an Apple fanboy (based on how much better their products work -for me- versus the competition), I'm very excited to see competition based on real innovation, rather than on the Microsoft Monopoly's ability to seize and lock up the competition.
I have not bought a smartphone (although I was a pretty early dedicated Palm user), and I'm waiting to see how the iPhone and Android mature before jumping in. The Crackberry -never- had any appeal for me (I had to fight one off back in 2002, the project I was working on was an early adopter.) As someone who types pretty well, the thumb keyboard has no appeal to me whatsoever. Pen-based inputs (e.g. Palm Graffiti, but not Graffiti 2 which was worse...) work for me on a handheld.
But a note to Verizon: If you want to continue to be my carrier, then you'll have to look way beyond your current handset offerings and their developers, and your approach to business/marketing. The other carriers are catching up in network quality, and the traditional "grab the customer and screw him for all he's worth" approach of the big carriers is failing in the face of the Brave New World the iPhone has helped create and that Android has legitimized.
dave
According to Yankee Group analyst Carl Howe, Microsoft is delaying Windows Mobile 7 to include features found in Android and the iPhone!
More here on the analyst views:
http://techpulse360.com/2008/09/23/microsoft-delays-windows-mobile-7-to-add-iphoneandroid-like-features-yankee-group-analyst-suggests-sees-palm-struggling-with-upcoming-platform/
AAhhhhhahahahahahhhhahhhhhahahahahah (exclamation point, DOCTOR !!)
It's already 6 months late (CE6 was Summer 2006, and WM based on the new OS has, for the past 10 years, been 18 months behind), so add on another 18 months and it's really two years late. WM6 came a year ago. Wm6 is CE5.02. WM5, which goes back to mid-2005, is CE5.01. So the transition from CE5-based OS (WM5) to CE6-based OS is FIVE years. Thems a lot of wasted days and wasted nights at Fort Redmond (Fort Bangalore to be accurate).