It wasn’t too many years ago that there were just two smartphone operating systems in the U.S., Palm’s and Microsoft’s.
Over time those two companies were eclipsed by competition from RIM’s BlackBerry, Apple’s iPhone and, more recently, Google’s Android OS. And don’t forget Nokia’s Symbian OS, which while it holds only a small share of the U.S. market, dominates most everywhere else.
Palm last year finally got around to introducing a new from the ground up WebOS and today Microsoft earned the spotlight. CEO Steve Ballmer today introduced Windows Phone 7 series, a new mobile OS, at the Mobile World Congress 2010 convention in Barcelona, Spain. The video of his presentation is on Microsoft's Web site.
“In a crowded market filled with phones that look the same and do the same things, I challenged the team to deliver a different kind of mobile experience,” Ballmer said.
Windows Phone 7 will deliver “phones that truly reflect the speed of people’s lives and their need to connect to other people and all kinds of seamless experiences,” he continued, which sounds pretty much like the same marketing message every other smartphone maker is delivering.
Still, Microsoft seems to have brought together some of its best and most popular applications on the desktop and from game consoles onto a mobile platform.
Ballmer shared the stage in Barcelona with Joe Belfiore, the vice president in charge of program management and design for Windows Phone 7, who went through a review of its features.
Gee whiz features for me from Belfiore were phone numbers that were automatically turned into hot links no matter where they are displayed, in an e-mail or text message or on a site. Click on the link and that number is dialed. Same thing for addresses, in which the user clicks on an address link and a map of the location is displayed. As the user zooms in by pinching the image on the touch screen, the map turns from an illustration to a satellite image.
Windows Phone 7 will run Xbox live games on the phone as well as the Zune music and video experience. From one hardware button on the phone, users can access Microsoft’s Bing search engine “providing one-click access to search from anywhere on the phone,” Microsoft stated in a news release.
Another feature of Windows Phone 7 is the way icons representing different functions are arrayed on the “Start” screen of the device. Rather than a static icon representing the function, the user will see “live tiles,” which, from the way Microsoft describes them, will be kind of like thumbnail images of the actual application. Not sure how necessary that is, but then again, I’m not in Barcelona today.
The OS is also centered on six “hubs” that are collections of related applications. The six are as follows:
- People. This hub collects all the user’s social networking content and enables filing status updates to Facebook and Windows Live.
- Pictures. This is for viewing and sharing photos on the device or on social networks.
- Games. Windows Phone 7 devices will be the first on the market delivering Xbox Live games.
- Music and video. The aforementioned Zune service will be integrated.
- Marketplace. One stop shopping for third party games and other applications.
- Office. The productivity applications for which Microsoft is known, including OneNote, SharePoint Workspace and Outlook Mobile are incorporated into Windows Phone 7.
There you go. Six hubs. Anything missing? Hmmm. Uh, isn’t this supposed to be a phone? Why no Phone hub?
I guess it must be a phone given that the major wireless carriers in the U.S. and abroad, as well as phone makers such as Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC Corp., HP, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Qualcomm Inc., are going to be selling devices running Windows Phone 7, in time for the holidays later this year.
That seems like a long time between the unveiling of a new product and its actual availability. Also unclear is whether Windows Phone 7 will help Microsoft emerge from the shadow created by BlackBerry, Apple and Android.
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