It’s fair to say that Microsoft has taken a bit of a beating in the OS wars recently. New market entrants (Android), the establishment going open source (Symbian) and a focus towards consumer-orientated operating systems (iphone and WebOS) have all left Microsoft struggling to find a voice that resonates with the market.
It’s no big surprise that Microsoft used Mobile World Congress to launc
h the latest iteration of its smartphone OS, Windows Phone 7. What was surprising was the extent of the changes and the noticeable buzz that propagated around the Microsoft stand as hundreds of congress-goers watched a live webcast from Steve Ballmer.
Three years ago I watched Microsoft launch Windows Mobile 6 (almost standing in the same spot). It was an evolution, nothing more. “Oh look, they’ve changed the fonts and colors.” You really had to question its long-term survival. Today’s announcement felt like the Redmond giant had finally found its voice and, despite the increased competition, had created something that felt fresh, differentiated and somewhat desirable. Make no mistake; this is a completely new OS, accompanied by a new brand and visual architecture.
Recognizing that smartphone growth is now being driven by consumers and not enterprise user, the Windows Phone 7 interface is built around a series of ‘live tiles’ (or super widgets as Joe Belfiore, VP Windows Phone, described them). These tiles pull in content from the user’s social networks and the web. The interface looks clean, structured and a welcome difference from the often-cluttered, widget-rich interfaces that seem to have proliferated over the last 12 months.
Maintaining a balance between consumer services and office applications, the OS has a series of hubs (people, pictures, games, office, music and marketplace ). For example, the people hub aggregates social networking status updates, messages, contact data etc; the music hub integrates music and video from the user’s PC and third party service providers etc.
Importantly, Microsoft will be specifying key hardware requirements to the OEM community. For example, all handsets must be multitouch and will require a dedicated hardware button to the Bing search engine. It seems that Microsoft wants to echo the close relationship that the OHA has forged with the OEMs and the consistency of hardware design applied to Android devices. The OS is fundamental to the user experience so ensuring a quality of service through closer hardware management and control seems to make sense. Where Microsoft may struggle is in the decision to lock the interface to the ‘tiles’. Competing OSs (including Android) allow the network carrier to personalise the interface to a far greater extent. This is, and always has been, an attractive benefit to carriers who like to deliver a consistent brand and experience across their installed base of devices.
Availability isn’t expected until Q4 2010, but Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC Corp., HP, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Toshiba have all committed to including Windows Phone 7 Series in their portfolio plans.
I’ll be heading to the Microsoft stand tomorrow for a closer look.
