So, today Mr Steve ‘DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS’ Ballmer has announced publicly details about Windows Phone 7. In the presentation full of meaningless adverbs there is a lot of interesting product features of the new phone operating system which I think will ensure that the product is a winner… hopefully.
Firstly is the “Metro” user-interface. This “delightful” UI (which is bloody brilliant to tell the truth) is one thing which I find rather interesting. It is clean, and sharp, yet most importantly completely different from the iPhone OS (iOS) and then the attempted clones of the UI which is commonly seen on Android. It looks clean, fast, functional and to an extent, fun to use and navigate. It’s like what you expect from Apple and like the experience you get with their products, it is truly brilliant and intuitive. Yet, this “Metro” UI appears to be brilliant at handling feeds from external sites such as Facebook, Twitter… and also the phone. Microsoft has named them “Live tiles,” and this is part of their main marketing effort. But this feature truly does set it apart from the other phones, and I can see this been a part of other smartphone OS’s because of the functionality of it.
Another important thing is text entry. Again, this looks very smooth and fits in with the UI. It also provides automatic correction, with a form of undo, and also spell correction. They isn’t much more to point out here, other than it looks very smooth, fast and well integrated; just like the iPhone.
Moving on to the Xbox LIVE integration which, in my opinion, is the killer feature on the phone; it has integration with the games which are coming on the platform, and more importantly with the rest of the Xbox LIVE eco-system. Everything from your avatar to your gamer-score is included as you would expect… even the ability to customise it too. But is they also a possibility of cross-platform games as we see with PC and Xbox 360? People will be asking “is this Microsoft’s handheld console push?” Yes, it most defiantly is. Developing your own hardware and then an OS to run over that is just too much work, and then another arm for Microsoft to focus on. So with the Re-launch of WinPhone7 I believe that they know they have a killer platform for the console, so they may as well move it up a level. I firmly believe that other competitors (Apple) know how important this feature will become as smart-phones (or App-Phones) are becoming ever more popular. We have seen Apple launch “Game-Centre” which is basically Xbox-LIVE for the iPhone. However, I have a problem with Apples effort in that it is too late. Many game developers have developed their own (for example Plus+ from NGMoco)… so I doubt that game centre will become as popular as Xbox-LIVE could be/is.
One of the key things about the Windows Phone is the Applications though. As I said when I wrote the Blackberry PlayBook column, without Applications the platform will fail. I have faith that they will be applications though, XNA developers have been playing with it for a while… so they will be many games and other apps. But one interesting thing is that EA are on board too, so this means they will be a large amount of titles which should be good, one example from EA on stage was The Sims.
Microsoft has a large amount of developers, developers, developers, and manufacturers (with only Apple (obvious!), Motorola (at first) and Nokia missing) to make a successful phone… if they can’t do it this time, they can’t do it at all. I think they is now a possibility (short term at least) of a three-horse race between Apple, Google, and now Microsoft for the mass-market device. However, it will be interesting to see how the other manufacturers retaliate with some of the new features implemented within this new OS.
So, I wonder if Steve ‘DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS’ Ballmer will pull this off. If he doesn’t, he’s fired!