Chinese Phone Maker ZTE Turns Down WP7

An anonymous reader writes "Chinese smartphone maker ZTE, fifth largest in the world, has publicly criticized Microsoft for the lackluster market reaction to its Windows Phone 7 operating system and said that ZTE has no plans to develop a WP7-powered phone. That's bad news for Microsoft for its well-regarded but not well-received mobile OS."

Comments

Re:Microsoft's "Problem"

[SpryGuy]

You're confused or uninformed (or misinformed).

The updates you refer to in (1) and (2) are the same update. They had some issues getting out the door and getting the update train running. Hopefully that's all smoothed out now.

And the first "real" update is scheduled for next week. It includes copy/paste, faster app launching, and a few other features.

A major update is scheduled for next fall, that includes a lot of new features, from multi-tasking to IE9/HTML5 support, etc. So yes, they DO have a plan to 'catch up', and in fact have been pretty clear in communicating it (they've showed off the fall update recently, demonstrating many of its new features).

Re:Microsoft's "Problem"

[Anthony Mouse]

One thing you've got to remeber is, while you as a developer may love wp7 that means nothing at all to the people that buy phones.

This is an excellent point. Microsoft is accustomed to having huge market share and trying to woo developers to their platforms (and away from other platforms) by making reasonable developer tools (which don't produce cross-platform binaries). In this case how easy it is to develop for WP7 is almost totally irrelevant right now, because developers aren't going to want to spend resources writing non-portable applications for WP7 if nobody is buying the phones.

Re:Good.

[PiSkyHi]

On the N900, I want Microsoft word suuport and I don't pay for Docs-to-go, I use either Abiword for simple docs or OpenOffice for stronger compatibility, I also use Gnumeric.

Re:Microsoft's "Problem"

[Wizard Drongo]

+1 for this one; got a genuine giggle from that!

Having been involved on the fringes of a microsoft-backed WP7 project (sub-contractor to the sub-contractor to the sub-contractor kinda deal), I can say the OS, ok it's not iOS, but it's a lot better than what you'd expect from a Microsoft mobile effort. But the hardware-software interlink is awful, shoddy and downright crap, it has NOTHING on the iPhone experience, and where it really, really falls down is the fact that, MS-backed (financed) projects aside, not much is being made because it's almost as easy as iOS to write for, with no actual plus points; no community, no customers, no hype, no nothing.