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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."
Welp, there's always android for now.
Pancakes. Oh I blew it.
Microsoft is just too slow and clumsy nowadays. Mobile Windows 7 may already be old at the time it hit's the market.
Ville / Varuste.net
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.
iPhone is way ahead of the game in this area, and I'm sure Apple intend to exploit this position agressively.
Microsoft must be kicking themselves for resting up during the last couple of revisions, whilst Apple takes away significant market share and "wow factor".
p.s i don't own an iPhone :D
I wonder if Microsoft or the mobile 7 software recognizes the gestures currently being submitted by the developers.
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
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.
The article uses very unclear wording in that part, so I thought I'd clarify.
Microsoft will release updated browser in their 6.2 update. The good news is it can render Flash and AJAX and so on because it's based on the rendering engine of the desktop Internet Explorer browser. The bad news: it's based on the desktop version of *IE6*.
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
It seems you are trying to use a hand gesture, but your current version of Windows Mobile doesn't support them. Would you like to preorder Windows Mobile 7?
Let's not mention this:
Let's also not forget that for a significant number of business users, WM 6 is quite sufficient and still beats the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry hands-down in a corporate environment.
For proof, take a look at the latest WM6 phones from HTC and Samsung, such as the Touch Pro about to come out in a few weeks.
All of these competing phone OSes are making improvements (such as the iPhone 2's ability to activesync), but by the time they catch up with WM6 in the business world it will be 2010, when Microsoft has released WM7.
-David
While you may be right in terms of the market, if you just want the best phone with the most flexibility and software, it's definitely going to be on WM6.x for the forseeable future, as long as you're willing to mod your phone
I'd have to say you're far better off getting an iPhone and Jailbreaking it if you are allowing mods into the picture. There's already a lot of useful software from the App Store and from the jailbroken apps today.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It fits into the 2006 list. Symbian market share is now down to 55%, just as Microsoft's WiMo fell from 23% back in 2004 to today's 12%.
Nokia is taking over Symbian and making it into an open source foundation because royalties are dropping rapidly. Nobody wants to pay for OS software. Without revenues (down 14%), Symbian can't afford to invest in modernizing.
The era of Windows-like software platform licensing is over. From here on out, it will be integrated proprietary platforms (RIM and Apple) or free platforms (Google and Ubuntu). There's no need for paying for a commercial software OS. Symbian is adapting, Microsoft is pretending the climate isn't changing.
Ballmer changes tune while dancing around Apple's success
BTW, palm wasn't good as an alarm clock either.
This is anecdotal, of course, but my Treo has reliably been my alarm clock for nearly two years.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Silverflash ftw
- Dan
Um, between Ballmer and Jobs, you've got the wrong reality-distorting Steve.
Mr. Clippy: You appear to have thrown your telephone with considerable force. I am unclear as to your intentions. Could you please provide me with some addition..[Splat!]
Have gnu, will travel.
Gestures on Windows Mobile are almost as old as Pen Gestures introduced back in the Tablet PC in 2002.
Sad that people in the mainstream don't have any idea where all this comes from and how Apple did better at marketing than innovating anything.
Yes on the "sad that people don't know where it comes from," no on the "Apple didn't innovate." Remember the Newton? Yes, that was 1993. A decade before your Tablet PC.