Microsoft dials up devs for Windows Phone 7

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 26 August 2010 18:18

Your IT - Mobility

Windows Phone 7 has been getting a very public airing at Microsoft's Tech.Ed 2010 in Australia, with demo handsets aplenty for attendees and journalists to play with, and with several sessions on business and consumer app development, Microsoft truly is 'back in the game', with Win Phone 7 devices shipping this year.

Smartphones. They've been around for a while, and Microsoft has a still relatively popular mobile operating system on the market, known as Windows Mobile 6.5.

Devices such as the HTC HD2 and HD2 Mini still use this 'ancient' mobile operating system, sexed up by overlay skins that do much to hide the fiddliness and non-finger-friendliness of Windows CE, and in the enterprise and business world still have a strong following.

But with the BlackBerry also popular in the corporate space and the iPhone and Android platforms generating much buzz, not only for all the juicy apps both the iPhone and now Android are well known for but for the vastly improved user interfaces these last two platforms use compared with the stodgy old Windows Mobile platform, things had to change, and change dramatically.

This change came earlier this year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, three years after Apple introduced the original iPhone.

It was a very surprising change from Microsoft, actually delivering a new interface that takes the 'smoothness' of the iPhone OS and Android platforms yet extending it in unexpected ways.

While the iPhone and Android focus more on apps, Microsoft has focused more on bringing disparate information together on 'one screen' in a way that leads to easy exploration of all the data on the device and linked to you in the cloud, along with a range of "hubs" of information, be it photos from your device and all across the web, your digital media, Xbox Live games and more.

Yes, Apple's 'home screen' of initial apps does have some ways of alerting you to new events, such as new email messages or 'pop up' dialog boxes that tell you of new SMS messages or other push notifications, but Microsoft's 'home screen' of info is the best I've seen yet on any handheld device.

And although the 'prototype' phone hardware being used wasn't the 'final' hardware form factors that will soon emerge, the experience was nonetheless super smooth, clean, graphical, fast and different to what we've seen before.

Even typing on the on-screen virtual keyboard is a pleasure, although in this regard it basically only catches up to what the iPhone provided with its on-screen keyboard in the first place - one that easily kept up with my finger taps.

Continued on page two, please read on!