Windows Phone 7: just enough and just in time

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 22 October 2010 15:04

Your IT - Mobility

Phew! Talk about cutting it fine - Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 has finally launched, just before the all-important Christmas/end-of-year/holiday shopping season with a genuine answer to the iPhone, and while there's still some rough edges, WP7 is arguably 2010's most surprising contender.

Having enjoyed great sales success earlier this decade despite having the most inelegant mobile OS in the now superseded Windows Mobile 5.x and 6.x platforms, the iPhone quickly put a stop to that as it magically revolutionised smart mobile phones.

Sure, Microsoft's partners who had heavily invested in creating WinMo 6.x handsets and 'skin' overlays tried as hard as they could to differentiate between Apple's offering and Microsoft's, but consumers spoke with their wallets, forcing manufacturers to switch to Google's Android OS to have any hope of competing with the iPhone tsunami.

Now that more than 3 years has passed since the iPhone's first unveiling, with the iPhone's operating system already having gone through several major updates to shortly culminate in version 4.2, Microsoft has finally responded properly: with a new OS and a new smarthphone strategy heavily mimicking Apple in some ways while preserving the old ways in others.

One example of preservation comes by Microsoft allowing a range of form factors from different manufacturers. An example of 'copying' Apple is with Microsoft's strict hardware requirements, and a surprisingly strict adherence to some of the first iPhone's values and capabilities, including no third-party multitasking, no copy and paste, no tethering, and synchronisation through special sync/music software, among others.

Particular attention to the design and usability of the user interface is something that Microsoft has also worked hard on, delivering a familiar yet different UI that would easily fool many into thinking it was made by Apple or someone else, and not Microsoft.

Particular attention has also been paid to Microsoft's Zune software, which is Microsoft's iTunes equivalent. Looking like it belongs on an iPad or the as-yet-unavailable Microsoft Windows Phone Tablet 7, the Zune software absolutely rocks, effortlessly pulling in my iTunes music library (minus any tracks with Apple's Fairplay DRM, of course) and showing me that Microsoft not only still knows how to write software, but can do it just as beautifully as Apple, or even more so - when it wants to or is forced to!!

I want to emphasise this point: Microsoft's Zune software rocks. It's easy to predict that we'll see this type of interface feature heavily in Windows 8, just as iOS now features, to some degree at least, in Mac OS 10.7 Lion.

It also looks like a very cool tablet interface, like a more powerful update to the Windows Media Center interface, and just as Steve Jobs likes to tell little white lies over whether he's interested in a particular market or capability (i.e. phones, tablets, video on small screens etc), so too is Microsoft likely telling porkies when it suggests Windows Phone 7 isn't be reworked to be a tablet OS in the future.

Continued on page two, please read on!