UI: Impressed

Name/Identity: Unimpressed

Strong-arming partners: Impressed

I didn't expect Microsoft to pull it out, but so far it looks like they have the most innovative UI since the iPhone debuted in 2007. Frankly, this looks like a nice "fuck you" to the competition out there and I'm actually pleased to see it. Thankfully (for everyone) Windows Mobile 6.5 was no indication at all of what the new platform was bringing to the table. It's still early and much of what has been shown (at least what I've seen) is only a little more in-depth than checking out the slip-cover on a new book.

Android and WebOS have been no competition for the iPhone. Google seems to have no control over what partners do with Android and by all accounts they may be digging themselves into the predicament Microsoft was in with previous versions of their Mobile platform.

This new platform should simply have been called "Windows Phone" - none of this "7" or "series" bullshit. Let's hope MS sees the obvious issues and drops the non-essential parts of the name. With the more simple name it enables them to keep moving forward with a unified platform, which is what it seems they want to do, based on their announcement.

OEMs will be more tightly controlled, pretty much having most of their freedoms cut-off when it comes to branding the UI. That's a very good step. No customs skins are allowed for instance. The hardware will also have more stringent minimum requirements, hopefully making sure the experience on every handset is similar and giving developers a clear target to aim for.

We won't see an actual product ship until sometime late in the year, but things look pretty good insofar as competing with Palm and Android. I don't think in the short term Apple's marketshare is going to be affected at all by this platform. I do hope that the aggressiveness of MS gives them a kick in the ass however.

Apple claimed that they had some years head-start on the competition, and while that remains true in terms of the apps available for the iPhone, the platform itself is nearly unchanged in almost 3 years - it's really been a standing target. Maybe we'll see some shakeup this summer at WWDC. What's also going to be interesting is to see how developers take to this new platform, since software for Windows Mobile is not compatible. Another good thing. Like I said in another thread, you have to start with a purpose-built OS sometimes, and the old Mobile platform just wasn't a good foundation for a phone or a hand-held computer.

Oh. NO Flash and NO third-party multi-tasking. Sounds familiar.

I expected them to integrate their Zune stuff with Windows Mobile 7. I had no idea that they were going to completely abandon every aspect of their previous platforms and build their phone OS entirely around the Zune platform design philosophies. That is a shocker to me. I keep reading things that say "if you're a Zune HD owner, you may find some of this familiar." I own a Zune HD, and the ENTIRE OS is clearly riffing on the design aesthetics of the Zune HD. And I definitely think that's a good thing, at least compared to Windows Mobile 6.x.

I will admit that the Zune does not have the prettiest initial static design look. It's very spartan, with simple white text on black background. But once you start moving in any direction, IMO it's a stunning interface. I simply love my Zune HD.

That calendar app, though, is just funky looking...

I am definitely interested in seeing where this is going, but I doubt I'll have one of these Windows 7 Series Phone Human Ear Edition devices (or whatever it's called), as they still plan to exclude the Mac platform. It's their choice to make, but I abandoned their desktop platform over 6 years ago, and a new phone isn't going to pull me back.

Dumping the entire OS and starting from scratch is what they needed to do, and I'm glad they finally felt the competitive pressure to do such a drastic thing. Microsoft does some of their best work when they are legitimately trying to compete in a market, and do their worst when they have killed off the competition. It's a shame they don't see the need to do this on the desktop side though. Windows 7 is still just lipstick on a pig, much like their Windows Mobile 6.5 efforts.

One of those unusual cases where I get to agree with just about everything Bruno says

I wrote this elsewhere:

"Sounds like they might finally be getting their act together, the old Windows Mobile really looks dead and they are talking about banning skinning of the UI (how long will that last).

Talk about a flaky demo though, the perfect touch was the "I'm out of battery" icon flashing away in the corner.

I'm not sure I get the whole Zune/XBox UI thing, particularly the bit where the title at the top of the page gets cut off and all this menus where you can't see all of the items on them without scrolling.

Still, if nothing else it will give Apple a boot up the arse to get on and do something more useful with the lock screen and app launch pages.

I wish Apple would add a physical back button to the iPhone, it makes so much sense."

It will be interesting to see if this is designed purely to be a consumer device and whether they'll roll out yet another rehash of the old Windows Mobile for businesses.

For now, yes, Windows Phone 7 Series is just a consumer plan. The old Windows Mobile will live on for a bit longer for enterprise customers. I guess in a way, we are back to the old consumer(9x)/corporate(NT) split on Windows, this time it's in the mobile space.

That's an interesting observation. I think they pretty much have to stay with 6.5 for business for a while, it's really not their choice, they have to cater to the corporations.

I don't think it's the same as the "consumer(9x)/corporate(NT) split" though. The difference here is that most people only have one phone, whereas with PC OSs, you have users using one thing at work and one thing at home.

With the former point, I assume you're talking about what you see in this image. If so, you really do get used to it, mostly because the transitions are as smooth as can be. Essentially, in every part of the UI, the very top of the screen has become the back button, but it's a back button with a little context and design aesthetic. It did take me a little getting used to visually, but I like it now.

As for your second point, I'm not entirely certain what you mean, but I do have an issue with how my Zune handles long text. Well, essentially it doesn't handle it. The text just goes off the edge of the screen and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

This is absolutely the most annoying when it comes to podcasts. For example, I listen to Buzz Out Loud from CNet. When I go into my list of episodes, I'll usually have two or three of them backed up. But it's hard to know which is which, as they all look the same because the episode number is cut off. Fortunately you can set up the Zune software to play your podcasts in both chronological orders (oldest or newest first), but it's still very annoying, and I can see it being more of an issue if you have some important information that you need to see on the phone version.

There are two examples of what I am talking about right there in the image you linked to.

Firstly, what screen am I on ? I can't tell because at the top of the screen all I can see is the bottom half of three letters. Very pretty and designery, but not very discoverable.

The second example is right below it, I can see the first three items of a menu, "Artists", "Playlist" and "So..." But I can't see what the third menu item is (or if the menu extends beyond that) without scrolling, again not very discoverable.

Another example of this sort of undiscoverability I saw in the demos was the contact lists. There is no A-Z list on screen, you have to know to tap on the letter that you can see in the list to pop up the A-Z list.

It is the discoverability of the iPhone UI that makes it usable by "normal" people like my wife. I can't see the Zune-like UI being frictionless in the same way because of these discoverability issues.

But I'm being a bit unfair, given that I've never actually played with a Zune let alone a Windows Phone Series 7 Phone (snappy).

I know a lot of people who carry two phones with them for exactly this reason. One is for work, and one is for personal use. Depending on how good (or crappy) the separation is between work and personal e-mail on the WPS7, many people may still opt to carry two devices. And if their work demands specific Windows Mobile apps, then it's almost certain someone will have two phones. The consumer base never really was there for Windows Mobile, and what is left will be fleeing the platform to focus on WPS7.

You have a good point, and I agree that if you just look at that screen, it's hard to tell where you are. But that doesn't really relate to how you use the OS. Screens like that are all transitional. You always know where you are because you know where you came from. For example, that screen shot is one click away from the home screen. Personally, I don't need an obvious reminder that I just clicked on "Music."


[for sake of information, the rest of the items are "Songs Genres and Albums"]

Again, you're correct, but what are the alternatives? You either have an intermediate screen where you choose between those items (that's how the iPod/iPhone does it, isn't it?), or you have a drop-down list where you see even less at one time. My preference is the way it's handled, because 99% of the time I select "Music" from the main menu, I want to find my music by artist. If I want another way to see everything, it's a mere two flicks away, and the player remembers your last view. I think this makes the player cater to the user more.


Well, I'm not certain how the iPhone does it, but doesn't it just give you an alphabet down one side that you can tap on to skip to a certain letter? Okay, fine, I'll concede that that's one fewer "clicks" away, unless you have fat fingers like me, in which case it's really hard to hit those letters dead on, and you have to do some additional scrolling.


I really do think that you need to check out the UI for yourself. I do agree that it is different from the iPhone, but I certainly don't think it's less "discoverable." The whole UI flows really nicely and very logically.

Of course, this is all getting very specific, and not even specific about what this thread is about. But I have faith in the UI that they're using because I like what they've done with the Zune.

However, one thing I will say is that Zune apps are just bad. I just don't like them or how they're handled. I don't know if that has any relation to the phone though.


I agree, some people do that. My wife dose that. What I said is that "most people" don't. And I think that's true.

Meh. Touch screen interfaces won't be mature until they've fully implemented LCARS on consumer devices anyway.

We'll have to wait and see how this all plays out and also what further refinements will be made to the new Windows Phone UI - it borrows from the Zune, but it's not the Zune UI from what I've seen/read.

MS appears to actually be trying. While the other guys... Aren't. IMO, Android is a total mess and the actions of everyone involved are devaluing the platform and brand more each day. You want the (now old by tech standards) 2.1 update on your phone? You may have to wait until Q3 2010. That's just ludicrous. I'll say it again. Google needs to take a firm grip on this situation and mandate that anyone claiming their phone is "Android" brand must have their updates ready to roll when Google says they need to be. Better still is a single Google source for updates.

As far as Palm is concerned, they make a tiny little splash every now and then, but no one's paying attention to these guys. They've had their moment in the sun already unfortunately. No matter how many times they show a Pre on the new series of 24.

Anyway, these nice MS moves aside, this whole thing might just play out like the whole Zune versus iPod situation. I hope not though. If I had pull at MS, I would have taken the same leap of faith here as the XBOX team did. Either absolutely no OEM licensing for Windows Phone or limit it to one or two top-tier brands that will each only supply ONE hardware product. Microsoft should have their own hardware available.

Ok, Microsoft is continuing their jack-assery. They're going to rename Windows Mobile 6.x to "Windows Phone Classic" - bad.

Bad because it's more dollars wasted on yet another Windows mobile rebranding. Bad because it serves to confuse and clutter the new Windows Phone brand even before it's established. With a plain "Windows Phone" they had the chance at a new brand going forward, completely void of ties to Windows Mobile. Now... Not so much.

No Flash AND third party multi-tasking does sound familiar...of the most popular smart phone ever.

These words from the lips of a disgruntled iPhone user.

IMHO, the genius of Android is mostly under the hood. They're doing a very clever process model, such that each app is running with a separate Unix user-id, thus limiting the damage that can be done if an app goes rogue or whatever. There are lots of other clever technical features. Most of Bruno's complaints seem to focus not on the technology, per se, but rather on the extent to which Google and its partners are managing it.

Google seems to be trying to pursue a business strategy of producing an open-source artifact which other firms can use at will, with or without Google's assistance. Needless to say, this limits Google's ability to require its "partners" to do anything at all.

What Google certainly can do is restrict the use of its Google brand. Many, but not all, Android phones are marketed as "The FuBar Phone with Google". Those last two words can be made into a series of tests and requirements, much like Microsoft has tried to do with the PC industry.

Tangential curiosity: Has Microsoft said anything about the Windows 7 software architecture, security model, and so forth?

The browser is the same codebase as IE for the desktop, so that's not a good sign for security.

Not much yet, but I fully expect it to be running Silverlight or some close cousin of Silverlight.

I know some one said something along those lines, but it really doesn't sound very likely. IE8 is pretty much all native code as far as I'm aware and I'd be staggered if they had gone to the trouble of porting that to an ARM CPU and WinCE.

Windows Mobile has always run processes under different process ids. Of all the developmental platforms Windows Mobile is the easiest to develop for bar none, everything is documented, no developer fees to pay etc etc... I don't think lack of apps is the problem with Windows Mobile either- it has thousands although most are very old and go back to the early PDA days. I think the problem with Windows Mobile is it just doesn't have the bells and whistles and touch-screen support that the iPhone has. In every other way it's probably superior.

User IDs, not process IDs. Maybe that's what you meant, but it's an important distinction. By default, no application has any access to any other application. There are IPC methods, but one process cannot scribble on another's space.

Oh, and Windows Mobile has had a horrid UI since day one. It's gotten better over the years, but it's still lousy. It's not bells and whistles; it's usability.

Minimum entry price to even compile a Windows Mobile app is $300 for Visual Studio Standard edition. Minimum price on the iPhone is $0 (XCode is free). The $99/year comes in when you want to run an app directly on an iPhone, and it also covers distribution. Windows Mobile, it's going to be whatever costs one would normally pay for web hosting/bandwidth.

As far as it being easier to develop for, it all depends on what you know. For someone starting from scratch, I'd expect learning C# and .Net would be no more easier or more difficult then learning Objective C and Cocoa.

$0 ever for Android development. $25 once if you want to publish on the Android Market.

The documentation is (currently?) really lousy, though.

I thought it was something like $30 to get an app on the market. No?

Oh, you're right. $25 one-time fee to register as a developer for the Android market.

The Windows Mobile dev environment is really "not all that", sure it's Visual Studio, but the mobile stuff seems to have been bodged and shoehorned in. I had a number of test units connected on a network running code, and I lost count of the number of times that the bloody dev environment would randomly decide to run on one of those rather than my local dev unit. Not to mention the fact that Microsoft seem to have deprecated "native" development under Windows mobile to the point where you have no realistic choice but to use the .NET CF, which in one of the applications left much to be desired performance wise.

You can't write to another processes address space in WM. Every process has it's slot that it lives in- you can't do anything outside that slot (except for the shared memorya area), it's a simple but effective memory management system.

Agree about the UI. But also consider that you can run Flash and Java on a Windows Mobile device. Microsoft at least doesn't inject it's reiligous wars on it's users by not allowing certain things on it's platform (probably because they were sued in the past for similar behavior).

Separate UIDs is important, but so is the security policy around them. Does Windows Mobile lock things down to the point that one app can write files out to its persistent store and have some guarantees that no other app can read them? If you were building something like, say, a DRM-enforcing app (e.g., the Kindle app), that sort of thing would be a prerequisite to keeping your secrets safe.

Every Windows Mobile product I've ever used stored applications and data in RAM. You lose battery power and you lose all your apps and data. That's just the beginning of the historically shite Windows Mobile experience.

It's the consensus among programmers that developing for Mac OS and the iPhone, is a pleasure as far as the frameworks and APIs go. I've only heard horror stories from developers and customers about .NET

The rumor du-jour is that Microsoft are looking at making their own handset. Likely OEM from HTC. IMO, this is the absolute only way they stand a chance at all in the market. Devices from third parties marketed under those third-party names are likely going to have a poor showing. Even with cumulative platform deployment courtesy of their OEMs, they're more than likely going to fall significantly short in overall market penetration, let alone touching the iPhone. Having untalented third parties touching your goodies can also lead to all sorts of other issues, including licensing woes for media. MS has been (rightfully) the sole Zune developer.

The closer together MS ties the new platform to the old, the greater their chances of failure. It's like they're tying their new shiny life raft to the hull of a sinking Titanic.

Are you talking about .NET generally or .NET on Windows Mobile ?

If you are talking about mobile then, fair enough. If you are talking about .NET generally, they I couldn't agree less.

.NET + Visual Studio is a great development environment, far better than any of the alternatives I've used (Eclipse and XCode to name two).