Microsoft Releases Final Windows Phone 7 Dev Tools

cgriffin21 writes "Microsoft on Thursday released the final Windows Phone 7 developer tools to manufacturing, giving coders a couple of weeks' lead time to get their apps ready for the launch of the Windows Phone Marketplace in early October. Microsoft released the Windows Phone 7 OS to manufacturing on Sept. 1, and its OEM partners are in the process of testing it on handsets. The Windows Phone 7 developer tools are the final piece of the puzzle for Microsoft, which is now ready to march back into a mobile market where it has fallen alarmingly behind the leaders." In related news, CNET reports that Windows Phone 7 will only be available for GSM networks at launch, with a CDMA version planned for the first half of next year. This rules out Sprint and Verizon for launch.

Comments

Android, iOS, Blackberry OS, Windows Phone 7?

[iONiUM]

WHO WILL WIN?! Actually it's kind of too late for Microsoft already. They're entering the market so late, what can they possibly offer consumers (I'm ignoring business use cases here, since it isn't for business anyways, or so they stated) that they can't already get from current offerings, and better?

Furthermore, and this really pisses me off, the phone can't even run Silverlight in the browser. I have made a large Silverlight app and to make it work on the phone I have to re-target it, then tweak it to work with the "non-mobile but also not normal Silverlight version on windows phone 7" which is stupid. And I can't even tell people to just browse to the "regular" Silverlight page because of course, that won't work either. What exactly are they doing here?

Re:Android, iOS, Blackberry OS, Windows Phone 7?

[Mongoose Disciple]

Actually it's kind of too late for Microsoft already. They're entering the market so late, what can they possibly offer consumers (I'm ignoring business use cases here, since it isn't for business anyways, or so they stated) that they can't already get from current offerings, and better?

I had come to this conclusion as well.

The only solution I can see if MS means to seriously compete in this market is to make the hard decision to run at a loss to try to get some momentum going -- to lose money on each Windows phone in much the same way that video game console makers usually sell the first consoles at a loss.

Re:Android, iOS, Blackberry OS, Windows Phone 7?

[happy_place]

this is a pretty standard Microsoft tactic. they add a billion features based upon a dozen standards and only implement about 30% of the standard. they claim they have the features, but they're implemented crappily--at least until people start screaming about it, and then they'll maybe implement 50% of it. this can be as simple as importing HTML into a Word document, and having it just decide not to support CSS in certain formats. Their browser supports it, but word only partly does. I think this happens because they have a lot of money, so they throw a lot of money at the initial implementation, but then leave the rest of it up to the thousands of code-monkeys to fix/polish and improve their standards, and they don't have a clue. Further why fully implement a standard that only a small fraction of users will use to a level of expertise that requires detailed support? So we're stuck with "good enough".

Re:Android, iOS, Blackberry OS, Windows Phone 7?

[I'm Not There (1956)]

They're entering the market so late, ...

I don't think so, not because MS have been making phone OS for a decade, but because iOS and Android are so young too. After all, Android is just two years old and iPhone has not finished its fourth year yet. Indeed, they've been doing great in these short years, but that doesn't mean they've guaranteed they're eternal success in the mobile industry.

Re:Android, iOS, Blackberry OS, Windows Phone 7?

[mark72005]

This is true, but this is a market where it typically takes around 2 years to even get a shot at a customer.

It will be exceedingly difficult for MSFT to gain a foothold in any market where it's 4th or 5th to the party, let alone this one.

What's their niche? In the desktop world they have business, but Blackberry owns business in the mobile world. Consumers will choose Apple or lower-cost Android devices more than likely.

It's hard to imagine a featureless and slow Windows Phone having anything very attractive to the average mobile customer strolling into an AT&T or T-Mobile store.

Re:Android, iOS, Blackberry OS, Windows Phone 7?

[mark72005]

When Android and Apple were joining, not only were they innovating, but they were establishing a market - smartphones for non-business consumers.

They didn't need to battle each other for market share, both were simply carving up an emerging customer base.

Microsoft enters the market at a time when most people who are interested in smart phones already have one. Their market share will have to be established by taking customers away from other platforms (very expensive), not grabbing people new to the game (cheap).

Re:Android, iOS, Blackberry OS, Windows Phone 7?

[commodore64_love]

>>>Better for them to lose money now, even lots of it, than for a free market (or a competitor) to win.

That strategy isn't working for them in the Xbox market. First they sold the Xbox for about half its actual cost of build. Now they are losing 10-20 dollars per 360 sold, but Microsoft is still being outsold 4-to-1 by the current winner. I know MS has deep pockets but how long can they continue this strategy? 10 years max? 15?

Microsoft is just like any other business and cannot afford to lose money on cellphones or any other product. Eventually their treasury will run dry.

Re:Android, iOS, Blackberry OS, Windows Phone 7?

[mlts]

The $50,000 question: What can Windows Phone 7 come up with that nobody else has, and make people willing to be locked via contract to two years with the device?

Before Windows Phone 7, WM was a great and extremely secure OS, next to BlackberryOS. It supported remote kills, encrypted the memory card in a simple, but elegant and secure fashion, allowed one to reset their password if forgotten on the road, supported a lot of applications (when Handango was the main way to purchase mobile programs), was easy to program for, and so on.

It is understandable that Microsoft wants to go from an open courtyard to a walled garden, especially with all the brickbats they have taken over the years (deserved and undeserved [1].)

As of now, we have a number of distinct platforms for writing smartphone apps, and each is different from each other by a large degree: We have Objective C for iOS, Java for Android/BlackberryOS, XNA or Silverlight for Windows Phone 7, and C++ for Symbian (IIRC). XBox coders will be fine with XNA for the platform, but iOS and Android app writers will not bother because it is a completely different platform and architecture.

Developers are looking at the numbers right now and growth rates. If I were to place my bets on a business application, it would be the tried and true BlackberryOS. If I wanted business users and consumers, it would be iOS. If I wanted consumers and some small business, Android. Where does Microsoft fit in here?

There is one niche I see Windows Phone 7 will be good for is Exchange support. I'm sure it will support encryption, remote kill, password changes, password complexity, and all that. However, is superb Exchange support good enough to get the phone into the enterprise, jostling out Blackberries and iPhones [2]? IMHO, it needs more than that to be a viable platform.

Microsoft makes some high quality products, but that isn't good enough. They have to grab market from entrenched companies and fight with Android for customers, both business and end user. I can see MS gunning at RIM for the enterprise users, but they have a fight on their hands for other markets.

[1]: A lot of Windows problems are not Microsoft's fault. They are due to application developers who do the absolute minimum to get code shipped with security as a distant afterthought. I'm sure there would be a lot fewer cases of compromised Windows PCs if application developers wrote their code to not crash if DEP was turned on globally, and allowed ASLR to function.

[2]: Apple is getting better with encryption, especially for Exchange. The only thing the iPhone is missing is the ability to set it so it erases itself if it does not get a network signal after "X" amount of time like Blackberries do. Similar with functionality to erase itself if the SIM card is removed or changed out.

Re:Android, iOS, Blackberry OS, Windows Phone 7?

[bmajik]

They're entering the market so late, what can they possibly offer consumers (I'm ignoring business use cases here, since it isn't for business anyways, or so they stated) that they can't already get from current offerings, and better?

I'd definitely agree here. After all, Microsoft wasn't 1st mover in any of the following markets:
GUI operating systems, Web Browsers, Web Servers, managed virtual machine languages, spreadsheet software, word processors, game consoles

As a result, Windows, IE, IIS, C#, Excel, Word, and Xbox are all minor competitors in a crowded marketplace.

Where is my sarcasm tag?

Honest

[Pojut]

I'm really hoping that Windows Phone 7 (both hardware and software offerings) bring something worthy to the table. Competition is a great thing, and if nothing else WP7 will at least light even more of a fire under the butt of RIM/Apple/Android devs to step up their game.

Re:Honest

[MBGMorden]

Competition is good, but honestly, I don't want competition from Microsoft. I WANT them to fail (and thankfully the market so far has obliged). Their stranglehold on the desktop OS market is a tough egg to crack. It's a position that isn't even held via merit anymore - it's just kinda the default choice because that's what almost everyone runs so support and software are all made for it.

Microsoft failing in the mobile market hurts their bottom line, but more importantly it harms their company image even further. The more incompetent they look, the more likely people are to try out something else on their DESKTOP too. Not to mention that one extreme benefit of the mobile OS wars and the increase in people browsing from phones is that web developers have HAD to start thinking mutli-platform. The days when you could just develop for IE6 because that's what everyone used are long gone, and the myriad of non-MS OS's in use on mobile phones played a sizable role in that. I don't want MS to have a foothold in that area.

Let some new players fight in the mobile OS market.

Re:Honest

[Rogerborg]

If hardware companies live up on the hardware side

Given the awful track record of WinME-family phones, I'd expect that the availability of Windows Phone 7 phones (doesn't that just trip off the tongue) will be largely dependent on Microsoft's willingness to "partner" with OEMs, in the same way that a scrawny fugly guy "partners" with an expensive hooker.

The old switcheroo

[SuperKendall]

They're entering the market so late, what can they possibly offer consumers

They can offer a wide range of phones all with a consistent UI. That's different from Apple (which has consistent UI but not a large range of phones) and from Android (which offers a wide range of phones now but with divergent UI).

Make no mistake, Android has taken over what Microsoft sees as ITS market (making phone OS'es for multiple vendors) and badly wants it back. And they still have a ton of money to make the attempt. And they have the same controls over application quality that has helped Apple in the application space.

Furthermore, and this really pisses me off, the phone can't even run Silverlight in the browser.

Microsoft does have some odd choices around technology support but I think these are only minor quibbles for what they are trying to do.

Surprised they aren't taking it more seriously

[HalAtWork]

I'm very surprised MS haven't been taking the mobile market more seriously, I thought they were trying to push netbook users towards mobile phone computing with their Fone+ initiative. They seem very non-committal in this space, either half-heartedly supporting various iterations of the platform only to refresh the brand after a hiatus and stubbornly pushing the same old thing on consumers, or dropping products entirely when they show any sign of weakness in the market. You don't build a platform and user base by running away when you get cold feet, you have to stand behind it, address concerns, and build up a sense of confidence in consumers. Why should anyone be confident of any of MS's mobile phone attempts when there are already very strong brands with a history that consumers can put their faith in?

CDMA, seriously?

[multipartmixed]

> This rules out Sprint and Verizon for launch.

In our backwards little country -- just north of y'all -- the big CDMA vendors have realized that CDMA sucks from pretty much every standpoint that matters. Bell and Telus have rolled out nation-wide HSPA networks.

And I have yet to see a 16-year old girl saying things like "I would have bought an iPhone, except with time-division multiplexing, there is a finite cell capacity; if Apple had rolled out code-division we could simply increase tower load by reducing quality of service"

Re:CDMA, seriously?

[irix]

There are two ways to go from CDMA to LTE, which is where everyone is going.

One is to obsolete your CDMA/EVDO network and deploy GSM/HSPA which has a direct upgrade path to LTE and provides inter-network mobility. This is what Telus and Bell did because they are running comparatively tiny networks.

The other is to move your CDMA/EVDO gear to CDMA/eHRPD and then deploy LTE with mobility between CDMA and LTE. This is what Sprint (modulo WiMAX as a step in there) and Verizon are doing, because their networks and number of deployed devices are an order of magnitude larger and deploying a GSM/UMTS network a year before switching to LTE is not viable.

I'm Canadian too, but it isn't like we have some sort of technical superiority or that Bell and Telus know something that Verizon and Sprint don't.

Microsoft very committed - in all directions

[SuperKendall]

I'm very surprised MS haven't been taking the mobile market more seriously

Microsoft has been taking the mobile market extremely seriously. Why else would have they have focused intently on WM 6, WM 6.5, the KIn, and WM7?

But that's the problem you see. These internal efforts, were all fighting one another. By focusing intently on several things, they were really focusing on none.

It looks like POSSIBLY with WM7 they may be finally choosing to focus on one system and push it forward. Time will tell how true that is.

Re:Microsoft and Incompetence? A tale of two smart

[gbjbaanb]

probably more important is the bit that said the phone manufacturers can't customise it.

So, can you imagine Samsung and HTC putting in vast amounts of effort to design, manufacture and market a phone that.. to all intents and purposes, is the same as the other one. Including the LG phone they cranked out cheaply and gets all the sales because of that.

At the moment, all my colleagues are excited by Android phones, everyone who had a HTC hero wants a HTC Desire, and now they're salivating at the Galaxy S. These are different phones, slightly differnet features, and that makes for happy manufacturers who suddenly release something and make vast amounts of cash - enough to pay for the next bigger, better model.

With Window Phone... why bother, unless you're the cheapest no-one will care for your phone. If it has an extra megapixel on the camera, you're just losing money compared to your competitor who sells thousdands more than you because they priced it $20 cheaper .. for exactly the same functionality.