Live anywhere ushered in by Win Mo 7 ?

[corduroygt]

Cell phones don't work like the PC market, you can't just make an OS to be used by different phone makers. That's why iPhone and RIM are successful, and Google realized this and made Nexus one.
WM7 is going to fail, unless it's sold with a phone made by MS and tuned for it.

 

[Asher]

People are too quick to write off WM7. The reason it's being delayed so much is they're going back to the drawing board on many ideas that are obsolete in WM 6.5 and before. WM6.5 was a quick bandaid, no one expected it to be wildly successful.

If WM7 is mainly powered by Silverlight apps and they refresh the UI paradigms, there's a lot of promise.

I say this as a guy who does iPhone and Android development predominantly right now, but I've made a couple .NET CF WinMo apps as well. Google gave me a free Nexus One on Monday, and I love it (and Android) to death, but it's far too quick to write off WM. Especially with how little is actually public about WM7.

 

[eastmen]

You'd think the market woulda learned after 6.5 times an utter failure. It's almost like someone is throwing money at this.

Considering how great win mo 5-6.1 was for the time they were released shows how little you know.

Before the iphone or google I was able to surf the web on my smart phone . I was able to sync my outlook and check my emails and get my work done.

Its easy to start from scratch with a new idea and put it out there with no baggage . But MS was doing their thing and now have to switch gears. It happens.

 

[Florin]

Considering how great win mo 5-6.1 was for the time they were released shows how little you know.

Before the iphone or google I was able to surf the web on my smart phone . I was able to sync my outlook and check my emails and get my work done.

The rest of the world was doing that on Nokia and Ericsson phones without the clumsy user interface. The early HTC WM devices were pretty awful phones. These days they're a bit better mainly thanks to HTC Sense but there still isn't any feature that makes them really stand out. Before that, PocketPC got thoroughly trashed by PalmOS (I had an Ipaq, eeew), and the WinCE Casio things before that were just laughable.

Windows Mobile has always been an OS looking for a reason to exist. If it were made by any other company, it would've long been dead and buried. So when you feel you need to post here how great it is that it is going to be resurrected again (this time by leveraging their XBox market share) then scepticism seems a fair component of such a topic.

 

[Florin]

Google gave me a free Nexus One on Monday, and I love it (and Android) to death, but it's far too quick to write off WM. Especially with how little is actually public about WM7.

I'm not writing it off. I'm sure it'll eventually be succesful, maybe with release 8, or 9, or 18. The zombie OS can't be killed after all.

 

[zed]

Smartphone marketshare for Windows Mobile was 19% in 2008, 18% in 2009 in the US. To put that in perspective, Android is still only at 5.2%.

but I believe thats counting all smartphones in existence, + since winmo has been around for years and android is only recent this is logical.
Now if u count what smartphones are being used/or being sold the story is a lot different

eg from your link
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2...d-android-in-two-horse-smartphone-os-race.ars

WinMo managed four and three percent in the US and worldwide respectively.

basically android's only been around for a year but its use more than twice as much as winmo is!
Unless MS stop charging for winMo this wont change

 

[eastmen]

Phones though are normaly refreshed every 2 years. It really doesn't matter how long something has been out. Only the current cycle really matters. do you think people are still running win mo 5 or win mo 6 ?

 

[Asher]

The rest of the world was doing that on Nokia and Ericsson phones without the clumsy user interface.

The S60 interface is the clumsiest I've ever seen on a phone. I literally returned my first and only S60 phone within the first week of ownership and exchanged it for a feature-phone because the interface infuriated me so much.

WM, for all of its quirks, was absolutely a better UI...even in WM 5/6.0. The S60 UI is a case study in disastrous UI choices. Nokia fans have adjusted to it and are used to it, but that doesn't make it good.

I had to make an app for the N97 and I couldn't stomach doing it. It was the worst development experience of my life and I felt like I was being punished every time I had to test the app out on the phone. Switch between WiFi and 3G, install and re-install..the process was ridiculously complex and convoluted. There was a whole fiasco when they tried to add kinetic scrolling to the N97 in firmware, but it was inconsistent and choppy....I still have nightmares about S60.

 

[Asher]

but I believe thats counting all smartphones in existence, + since winmo has been around for years and android is only recent this is logical.
Now if u count what smartphones are being used/or being sold the story is a lot different

eg from your link
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2...d-android-in-two-horse-smartphone-os-race.ars


basically android's only been around for a year but its use more than twice as much as winmo is!
Unless MS stop charging for winMo this wont change

You are moving the goalposts. You are now looking at numbers quoting AdMob metrics based on users browsing the web, which are different than sales and usage marketshares. They are measuring different things. I'm not at all shocked by the numbers, as RIM and WinMo phones tend to be more enterprise-oriented. That graph completely marginalizes RIM, which is ridiculous (Blackberries are ubiquitous and selling like hotcakes still).

The point stands -- WinMo marketshare in terms of device usage and sales is not nearly as dire as some people here make it seem. I've seen several extremely questionable assertions here that are downright misleading -- the "% of overall phones" metric and now this statement about web-browsing marketshare (and in this case you didn't even make it clear what the excerpt was referring to, the context was phone sales...very misleading).

 

[NRP]

I use my 3G iPhone mainly to browse the web. Before the iPhone, I had an HTC phone with WinMo, and overall I liked it better than the iPhone. The iPhone has a cool UI, but it is slow and doesn't like some websites. Also, it is usually an exercise in frustration to type posts on an iPhone.

I think my next phone is going to be a WinMo phone.

 

[corduroygt]

Make a zune phone (probably call it something else) and WM7 will succeed, especially if you integrate into windows live. Having many manufacturers make different phones for the same OS doesn't work as evidenced by the success of iphone and Google's move to make a phone.

I have used the S60 N95, iphone, and a WinMo 6.5 phone, and the Winmo was definitely worse than the S60, you need a stylus, the horrible touchscreen, etc. S60 worked well when phones weren't touchscreen. It worked quite well actually.

Iphone showed that you could make a touchscreen phone that is usable, and Google is now following suit. A WM7 MS phone would make the perfect handheld gaming platform competitor in the market. Just like the xbox, they just need to make it closed system.

 

[scently]

Hello, here it is.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/15/...is-official-and-microsoft-is-playing-to/?s=t5

 

[eastmen]

Hello, here it is.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/15/...is-official-and-microsoft-is-playing-to/?s=t5

yup looks really good. Pissed that at&t are the big partner , they really suck in this area.

I'm on sprint now with a sero plan. Sure I wont be able to keep the plan and move to win mo 7. But i will choose between sprint or verizon depending on who gets what phone. Both have better coverage and speed in this area.

 

[AzBat]

• Collect Achievements and build your Gamerscore
• View Xbox LIVE leaderboards
• See your Xbox LIVE Avatar
• Access Spotlight feeds, including the latest tips and tricks, game news, updates and more
• Add Xbox LIVE friends to your friends list while out on the go
• Turn-based (asynchronous) multiplayer gaming

http://www.majornelson.com/archive/2010/02/15/xbox-live-coming-to-windows-phones-7-series.aspx

More Xbox & games details will be at...

GDC (March 9-13, San Francisco)
http://www.gdconf.com/

MIX (March 15-17, Las Vegas)
http://www.microsoft.com/events/mix/default.aspx

Tommy McClain

 

[Tchock]

WP7S (I HATE the name) has this one major thing going for it in terms of apps and game dev: unification.

When it's released it'll be the only platform that will be more unified than the iWhatevers hardware wise (now that WebOS has breached ARM11 sacrilege, Android has no chassis plan in sight, and Bada is basically poised towards the lowend market! Symbian is still stuck at ARM11 and Maem-MeeeeeeGo complicates things now)

You'll have at least an A8 clocked decently with a decent (? Snapdragon vs OMAP3?) GPU, a WVGA screen (the gold standard from now on until very long after), 3 (useless) hardware buttons so it's all touch...

Basically it's like moving 3GS hardware to the 3G/Appstore launch. Zero fragmentation for 7S itself.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

The most important move MS is making with WM7 is having strict minimum performance and design guidelines. Hopefully that will avoid poor performning or horrible looking WM7 phones.

It'll be interesting to see what sort of games will get made for this as well as how much support they'll get for apps and games.

Still not interested in a smartphone myself (I want my phone to do 1 thing and 1 thing only, make and receive calls ), but it's fun to look at them.

Regards,
SB

 

[Asher]

Windows Phone 7 looks pretty spectacular.

The people who wrote WM off even a few days ago must even admit that.

Lifehacker's impressions are extremely positive.

http://lifehacker.com/5471805/windows-phone-7-series-everything-is-different-now

 

[LightHeaven]

Not exactly ground breaking, but it seems that Live Anywhere is indeed coming, and its going to be cloud centric:

http://www.ozymandias.com/multiple-screens-is-the-new-main-screen

Now that the original xbox is no longer supported, i'm sure Ms will be making a series of announcements regarding cloud features for live (having all your saves stored in the cloud would be super sweet for instance).

 

[Silent_Buddha]

That'd be pretty cool to be able to access your saves from anywhere in the world on any X360 or PC...

Regards,
SB

 

[LightHeaven]

Ms open to Psn on Phone 7?

http://www.techradar.com/news/phone...pen-to-playstation-on-windows-phone-7--671089

I'll believe when i see it (Heck, i think that even seeing i wouldn't believe )