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Microsoft Unveils Windows Phone 7 Lineup
adeelarshad82 writes "Microsoft officially unveiled its Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system, announcing that it will be available on a total of five devices in the US. Windows Phone 7 handsets from AT&T and T-Mobile will begin shipping in November, while devices from Sprint and Verizon will be available next year. In all, Microsoft announced nine Windows Phone 7 phones, the remainder of which will be available in Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Singapore, and Australia. It will debut in some European markets on Oct. 21. While early signs are encouraging for Windows Phone 7, it is being deemed as do or die for the future of Microsoft's business."
So they really expect to take over the market share that RIM/Apple/Android have over the cellphone industry? From what I've read it's a step forward for the windows mobile OS but it's not going to tear anything up. And this from a .net developer who loves his Droid X.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
If they don't get traction with 7, they can do 8. Or buy Nokia or RIM out of couch-cushion change. Or several dozen other ways to buy into the market that I haven't thought of but I'm sure someone in Redmond has, singly or in combination.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I've played with a developer phone in the last month and I'm currently an iPhone user. I have to say I think they're on to something. I like the iPhone, but I'm probably going to switch to WP7 in November. The integration between app and data is an order of magnitude higher than any other phone out there.
http://chicagodave.wordpress.com
Electronics Arts also announced the first wave of games coming to Windows Phone 7, including "Need for Speed Undercover," "Tetris," and "The Sims 3." Tetris? That's a launch title? Ouch. Need for speed came preinstaleld on my droid, much to my annoyance. Wonder how much bloatware MS is going to get crammed in their OS.
mini's been saying the same thing - that WP7 is the product that will hopefully tie Microsoft together (but comments are weighing heavily towards the "or else" scenario)
KIN3 FTW !!!
-- Barbie
Where is cut and paste and multitasking?
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft can get any buzz with this. It has to be better than IOS, Android, and WebOS. It is only available in the US on AT&T and maybe TMobile. So on AT&T will people buy it over the iPhone? Will AT&T push it much? TMobile is the smallest carrier but they are a good carrier. Will they push it over Android since they have a long record with Android and the G2 has just launched?
Microsoft is just in a very bad position. It isn't like the XBox where they came from nothing. They have a product that for the most part is boring and have been beaten up by both Apple and Android in this market.
Unless WP7 is just super great it will be blah... Or to put it better it will be the Next of Kin.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
MS still controls the desktop, and lots of high end business market. That is a very solid, very profitable market. Then of course there's their office suite, game console, and so on. Having a strong mobile market would do nothing but help them for sure, but if you think they have to "do it or die" you've got your head in the sand. MS is doing just fine.
Care to name any of those awesome products?
Zune?
Kin?
The red ring of death generator AKA XBOX 360?
Wow. Just... wow. The HTC surround actually has a slide-out speaker (from Yamaha!)? I can't think of anything I want less in a cell phone. Maybe they should come out with an HTC ButteredPopcorn with a slide-out popcorn popper so I have something to snack on while reading all the (apparently deserved) MS-bashing around these phones.
I saw a demonstration of Windows 7 Mobile last week. Microsoft decided to remove the VPN client and remote desktop features that were available in previous versions of Windows Mobile. But the award for lamest concept by a large margin was replacing cut and paste with auto-complete. That didn't go over to well during the Excel Viewer demonstration where people were asking how you transferred formulas from one cell to another.
Please take it from my lengthy, extremely painful, dissatisfied experience. Never buy a Windows Mobile phone. Ever. I don't care WHAT they might have done to this version of the software, I can guarantee you it will not work a fraction as well as any alternatives.
I own an HTC Mogul PPC6800. I have never experienced a product so poor, so lacking in quality and completely failing to fulfill its most primary functions. Every day I have to use it I wonder to myself how it was even released. I have never seen such a poor product even be allowed to enter consumer hands in exchange for money. It is just that bad.
I felt this would be a good topic with which to share that experience.
"And the iPhone seems to have gotten a little long in the tooth, falling behind Android in many areas, feeling very rigid and "controlled", with few choices."
I don't know if you haven't really read anything about WP7, but it is cloning the Old iPhone, no "cut n' Past", no real multi-tasking, no flash, no side loading applications.
If iPhone "rigid and controlled" is bothering you, it won't change much in WP7, why not go to Android. What do you think WP7 will give you that Android won't?
My problem with Microsoft is that they insist on programming everything in-house and lock you in to in-house networks and in-house apps. I prefer a rich ecosystem like the iPhone and Android where people can make their own apps and have them integrate into your social networking life.
Microsoft - once again - seems to want to make all your decisions for you and shove all their products down your throat.
I seriously wonder how many Microsofties will eat their company's dogfood and geniunely love it.
Y
Or you can get an Android phone. My Aria, despite the lack of "unknown sources" option, can still load other apps via the SDK. And the SDK is free too.
I'm not going to talk heavily about whether or not Windows Phone 7 is a good consumer phone. Only time will tell what kind of market adoption it will have verses the iPhone, Android, and Blackberries already present in the market.
I will, however, bemoan the complete lack of enterprise-ready features. Support for Exchange and and Office are good, but it's still a step backward from Windows Mobile 6.5. There's no support for 3rd party or enterprise apps. No mention of tethering or security certificates. Enterprise features such as have been promised at a future date, but I need a enterprise ready phone now. Maybe the Windows mobile 6.5 platform can be stretched to cover this need another year or two. But at this point, they're very little reason not to accept the reduced set of enterprise features and move to Android or the iPhone.
In its rush to grab a chunk of the consumer market, Microsoft may lose what market it had in the enterprise world.
Shameless plug for my photos on Flickr
Microsoft added Angry Birds to Windows Phone 7 site, Angry Birds developer say WTF!!!!??? They are so interested in making Windows 7 Mobile OS popular, they are making one sided friendships.
"Some people had hardware issues -- oh no"
A 65 percent failure rate on a piece of consumer hardware?
A 1 percent failure rate would be insane. That would be 1 out of every 100 consoles consistently failed. Well made consoles like the PS3, Wii, PS2, GameCube have failure rates in the sub .1 percent range.
The Xbox 360 is a piece of garbage. Microsoft knew it was defective before they rushed it out the door back in 2005 and did nothing to fix the inherent design defects.
Microsoft deserves the hate of gamers and the console world. They are reaping what they sowed. The console world has prided itself that it was gaming that just worked. You plugged your new console in at the start of a generation and it kept working to the end of the generation. Microsoft' piece of garbage Xbox 360 made a mockery of that concept.
The $99 fee is the annual Marketplace registration fee. To skip the market: Deploying XAP Files to Windows Phone 7.
Definitely a shill. Been waving the blue, red, green & yellow flag since the Win7 beta: http://slashdot.org/~SpryGuy
He just LOVES the office ribbon too.
Sharepoint? You've never used it - Drupal is a lot better from almost every viewpoint.
Silverlight? So good its only got a 60% market share (accrding to Microsoft) and they're looking at partnering/buying Adobe for Flash.
Expression suite isn't so bad, but its a bit like FrontPage for the hackery it puts in your designs. Take a look at all the expression dlls the generated code references.
C# 4.0 - dynamic types (and crap like extension methods) is weakening the language. Now, you can slap code together like a scripting language, and most code will have just the same amount of quality to it as a lot of script has.
You don't need the whole SDK, just ADB (which is bundled with the SDK). adb install app.apk. There is probably also a method to install from rooted (su'd) terminal on Android. pm install app.apk? I've only used pm for uninstalling, so that last command is a total guess.
Anyway, I concur with the previous AC. Google would have done themselves a benefit had they wrote an add-in for Visual Studio. It's not that difficult. Probably no one at Google uses VS, but that's not a good excuse to ignore it when welcoming developers to the platform.
Sharepoint? You've never used it - Drupal is a lot better from almost every viewpoint.
Unless you're a business that uses Office for everything. You know, like almost all of them.
I mean, I'd pretty much rather stick my hand in a lawn mower than be a Sharepoint developer, but it's good at what it's supposed to be good at -- even if that thing isn't sexy or what you'd want it to be.
MS didn't show it in the demo (that I saw).
The quality of the browser is paramount. Do we know if it's any good? Their last one sure wasn't.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
But iTunes has got to be one of the worst, most bloated, most annoying applications I've ever loaded on my PC (and that's saying something)
I'm confused. What do you need iTunes for, exactly?
You can use Media Monkey to sync your media onto your iPhone. With iOS 4 you can create playlists on the phone.
You can download and install apps from the phone. After buying an app on one device you can download it free on another with the same account (why doesn't this apply to media?).
The only reason you'd need iTunes would be to perform backups and to activate your phone the first time you use it. Considering that backups don't actually back up everything (definitely a negative, Apple, I'm looking at app settings and information), you really just need iTunes once.
The last time I synced my iPod Touch was mid June, and the last time I synced my iPhone was August 2nd, when I upgraded to iOS 4.
And this is on a Mac, where iTunes is a staple!
Windows Phone 7 seems to be like the Zune. There was nothing really wrong with it. The problem MS faces is that like the Zune it's an "okay" product in a crowded market place. If you are entering that kind of market, you have to be "spectacular" to get noticed. With the Windows Phone 7, they can't even rely on existing users as this release is incompatible with older versions and is heavily consumer focused so existing users are unlikely to buy them (business users). Time will tell if this was a smart move by MS.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The quirk is that like many other pieces of Microsoft technology, while truthfully claiming it is "cross platform" it is really only implemented and running smoothly in one central platform. Live is in Messenger but is only a thin/lightweight client. There is a web interface at xbox.com but again the functionality seems limited. Even on PC the support is highly variable and dependent on the vendor. It truly shines on the 360 though but even the version we see to day on the dash is only after years of aggressive revision. I expect Win7 Phones to have some neat features but nothing to make me change how I use Live, XBox or other flavor.
But beyond that, Microsoft's fixation on Apple seems wrong. Microsoft's competition is really RIM/Blackberry for the business crowd and Google for replacing them in the Phone OS market. While Microsoft was failing to deliver on Windows Mobile 6, RIM came in and swept up the tech business customers with a lot of enterprise connectivity features while Google came in a replaced Microsoft as "the guys who make phone OS". Apple is worth some attention but RIM and Google cost them their base so why focus on Apple?? Microsoft's current obsession on beating Apple is derailing what they should be concentrating on so I'm not really surprised Microsoft thinks it is important to have Live integration to win against Apple.
Is Microsoft the new Palm? I guess we'll find out but it isn't a good sign when Microsoft seems equally interested in rattling sabers with phone fabricators to make Win7 Phones for patent protection...or else!
It's a great service for gamers who have Xboxes. For general consumers that don't have an Xbox or Xbox Live, there isn't much of an advantage to having Xbox Live integration.
MobileMe is a great service for iPhone owners with MobileMe. For general consumers that don't have a MobileMe account, there isn't much of an advantage to having MobileMe integration.
See what I did there?
There are far more Xbox Live subscribers than MobileMe account holders. Only a tiny fraction of iphone owners get a mobileme account. Yet several of the iphones more interesting features are locked away behind that service. If WinMo7 offers mobileme features for free + extra stuff that ties into the gamer-centric xbl it will potentially be quite attractive to a LOT of people.
There are far more Xbox Live subscribers than MobileMe account holders. Only a tiny fraction of iphone owners get a mobileme account. Yet several of the iphones more interesting features are locked away behind that service. If WinMo7 offers mobileme features for free + extra stuff that ties into the gamer-centric xbl it will potentially be quite attractive to a LOT of people.
MobileMe is for consumers that use Windows, OS X, iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPads. Xbox Live is only for gamers that use Microsoft's Xbox gaming platform. Gee, which population is bigger? Consumers or Xbox gamers? Targeting such a niche population isn't a major benefit.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
There are roughly 2 million MobileMe subscribers vs 23 million Xbox Live Subscribers.
Gee, which population is bigger?
Indeed.
Targeting such a niche population isn't a major benefit.
"such a niche population"?
A survey of 5,000 Xbox 360 owners shows failure rate of 54.2% with over 40% reporting a *second* failure.
Another survey of 500,000 reports a failure rate of 42%.
The 65% failure number may be somewhat high, but the numbers in the two surveys I found aren't reassuring. There's no way that I would knowingly put my hard-earned money into a product that failed about half of the time. I can't believe that MS wasn't forced to recall the systems.
God is imaginary
C# 4.0 - dynamic types (and crap like extension methods) is weakening the language. Now, you can slap code together like a scripting language, and most code will have just the same amount of quality to it as a lot of script has.
You cannot "slap code together" because C# still doesn't give you the way to define those dynamic classes easily, only to consume them (well, okay, ExpandoObject veers somewhat into JS territory, but without prototypes). "dynamic" stuff is intended to easily use code that is already written in a dynamically typed language or framework (Python, Ruby, COM IDispatch etc), not to write your own C# code that way. And that is how it is used, pretty much - so far the only production code with "dynamic" I've seen was for COM only.
As for extension methods, they're not dynamic in any way - they're statically resolved, and are purely a convenient syntactic sugar to write "x.list()" instead of "Collections.list(x)".
I see what you did there. Neat fallacy, but let's make things honest (and more in line with GP's point):
* There are 23 million XBox gamers with XBox Live subscriptions
* meanwhile, there are roughly 1.5 - 2 billion human beings who could be reasonably considered as "consumers" out there.
But, you were busily counting one phone's potential pool, versus the paid result of the other. See the problem?
Now, to be perfectly fair, out of the 23m XBox gamers, you're going to have to remove the under-18 demographic, and a reasonable percentage of folks who can afford an XBox, but not an ongoing smartphone plan. The leftover folks may or may not consider a console-phone semi-link to be a factor, let alone a deciding one.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Well, of course everything can be passed around with streams, since any kind of data is representable with a stream. The question at hand is the convenience of processing of said data. E.g. if you want to filter the output of ls, you have to parse its output stream, e.g. using grep or awk. This is very easy to get wrong, brittle since it does not permit significant variations to output format in future versions (even strict additions could break things), and inefficient performance-wise since you parse text data right after it was formatted to be text from a bunch of internal structures - the whole formatting/parsing part is strictly wasteful.
PowerShell tackles this by providing a higher-level form of data abstraction. It doesn't have to be objects, of course (e.g. I'd prefer s-exprs), but the point is to have something with a well-defined structure. To return to a specific example again, in PSh, ls outputs a collection of objects with certain properties; you can feed that to "object grep", which can filter any collection type on any set of property values, or on the value of an arbitrary expression evaluated in the context of individual collection items.
Note that PSh still guarantees that output of any command is always ultimately representable as a text stream. E.g. if you do "ls > foo.txt", the collection of items will be converted to a string formatting said collection along the lines of classic ls, which is what ends up in the text file. Similarly, if you pipe an object to a process which is not PSh-aware (and therefore expects stdin to be a stream), that process will also get the text representation. So you don't really lose any flexibility compared to Unix - any technique which worked on text streams will keep working.