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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 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.
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.
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*.
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 can be programmed easily using well known and widely used language
Fixed - I don't think any JVM based languages other than Java are anywhere near widely used, and Android has no provisions to execute "bare metal" code. I may be a good thing after all, because it ensures compatibility of all Android apps with all Android phones despite different hardware.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
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
Windows Mobile, Microsoft still hasn't released an update to handle gestures.
Windows Mobile has supported gestures for a long time. The Summary is misleading, as it is 'Gesture Navigation' that was to be expanded in Windows Mobile 7.
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. Most of us have been suckered by Apple, not helped by them.
Go look up multi-touch gesturing which comes from both MS Tablet (yes there were multi-touch tablets back in 2002 even), MS Research and demostrations from the TED conference about 5 years ago. Apple copied the TED expansion of the demostrated concepts idea for idea, even using the 'made up' gestures for the conference that were only to be 'examples'. -Google the TED Video.)
Another misleading item from the summarty is voice input, as Windows Mobile has had voice recognition dialing for a long time, something the iPhone still seriously lacks except from 3rd party add-ons. And sadly, something even free phones from Walmart can do that make the iPhone look sad. (Bluetooth headset users know this all too well.)
If you know C and it takes you longer than twenty-four hours to become familiar enough with Objective-C to program an iPhone then you don't know C.
Objective-C is an extension to C, not some completely new language.