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Did the Windows Phone 7 Bomb In the US?
Thorfinn.au writes "Microsoft's new smartphone platform is off to what could be considered a slower start than expected in North America. That's according to The Street, which has released a report saying that the company sold some 40,000 units on its first day on the market.
Early sales numbers from other phone platform launches include Apple's estimated 500,000 iPhones being snatched up during its launch weekend in 2007, and a million and a half G1 Android phones being bought up by T-Mobile subscribers in the phone's first six months." Do you know anyone with one of these phones? Me either.
Neither?
Apparently most stores only got 10 or so units and they sold out immediately. Pretty hard to sell more units of something if you don't have the stock.
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for an hour. Set him on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I have an N900, run GNU/Linux at both home and work and will probably by an HTC Android phone sooner than later. Nonetheless the UI on the Windows Phone 7 looks pretty lovely to me. I think MS has done a fine job.
The question these days of course is not what the phone can do OOTB, but what you can install on it later. AFAIK there isn't much of an 'app ecosystem' for the platform. They're also charging device manufacturers a license fee to ship with the OS, which isn't smart in a world rapidly flowing with Android phones. I wouldn't ring the death bell just yet though - it seems the market's changing pretty fast with the iPhone losing it's fashionable appeal here in the EU now that road-workers, plumbers and unemployed single fathers have the things.
Market differentiation allows for consumer individuation - something Apple's aesthetic homogeneity, doesn't offer. Think Similar (TM).
Well a few things to put into perspective. 40,000 is the reported number by a third party. That number may not be correct. The actual number may be higher or lower.
The second thing is that the G1 was one model from one manufacturer. By reports, there were 9 WP7 phones from several different manufacturers. Initially there were reports that some places were "sold out". If the number is correct then there was not a large initial supply. With 9 different models, it's hard to believe the manufacturers released less than 6,000 units per model.
The discrepancy might be that MS has reserved one for every one of its employees. So that 90,000 additional and may have created an artificial scarcity not driven by consumer demand.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I arrived at AT&T 10 minutes after they opened and they were sold out the 4 phones they had. I was the first person to get on the waiting list. There were 5 people behind me waiting to get on the list. They did receive one more phone that day and I got it. I suspect the demand was higher that day than the available inventory. As for the phone, I love it. Showed it to my wife and kids (14 & 16). The kids raved about it, and my wife (not a technology nerd) was surprised she like it so much versus her iPhone (3G). The UI is very slick, usable and responsive. This is not your typical Microsoft version 1 product. It feels a lot more like it came from a first class consumer electronics company than a business software company.
WM5/WM6 didn't really have significant lockdown, but as I understand it, the differences are:
WP7 - Adds a shiny UI
WP7 - Removes quite a few features/capabilities present in WM5/WM6 (see above regarding encrypted Exchange connections as an example)
WP7 - Adds iPhone-style lockdown
WP7 - Removes cut and paste (present in 5/6)
WP7 - Removes multitasking (present in 5/6)
The question is - how much of this crippling was an intentional design decision, and how much of it is Microsoft pulling a KDE 4?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I will bother, because it is a fact that mobile ie in Windows mobile 7 is in the core an ie7 with some bugfixing backports from ie8, so slightly better than ie7 but worse than ie8 with probably a different error behavior in many issues between both versions. And I am not making this up, this is the official statement from Microsoft!
Believe it or not but you can read that up in the blogs of Microsofts mobile division!
Microsoft has done that in the past as well, mobile ie 6.5 was in fact an ie 5.5 engine with some ie6 backports, needless to say this browser was a desaster bugwise, different bugs than both ie 5.5 and ie6 with some carried over from ie6 and some from 5.5 and add to that a bunch of its own bugs.
We all have different needs and wants from our devices so to help you understand my angle; I am an occasional business traveler who enjoys being connected to email, can access maps and driving directions, restaurant and business information nearby, read various Office documents, and generally stay in touch. I am also a hobby programmer and enjoy writing little utility apps for my personal use. I am not a heavy app downloader - my iPhone had all of 20 installed apps. I am a gamer but generally enjoy puzzle and strategy games over FPS or other games that demand heavy real-time input. I do not own an XBox (PS3 for me). I do not use Facebook or Twitter in any real capacity. I tried, and I just don't get it. And finally I am a HUGE music lover. I'm the guy that still buys CDs for the artwork and rips them at higher bitrates. I'm always on the lookout for something new. I also rip all of my DVDs (movies and TV) so I can take them on travel and watch them on the plane.
If you picked up on the iPhone comment above your first question might be why I considered defecting? The simple answer is iTunes. I've had many minor glitches and nags with iTunes over the years, however the recent move of my music and movie library to a NAS was so painful it was the last straw for iTunes.
So what's to like about Win7?
WP7 doesn't even have a sockets API. You're expected to use HTTP for everything.
oh my, what do the other numbers break down to?
180 days, 1.5M units = 8,333.3 units per day
Who cares? I think it'd be funny if WP7 went the way of the kin, but the article and summary were poorly written.
Like anyone can even know that