As someone who developed a non-trivial GIS application on .NET I can't relate to those experiences. With .NET you get visual GUI development, instead of the stone-age XML file GUI design with Android, and very good code portablity with .NET code that runs on PCs. Battery power/Memory problems? Nope- my application is for hiking so it is shows where you are on huge Topo and Elevation maps. The tiled image file database I made got up to half a Gig on the Storage Card. Not only that it is recording your track log while you hike. I have gotten eight hours of battery life out of my phone while doing this easy- and my phone is notorius for bad battery life (Moto Q).

I'm not familiar with (at least non-ancient versions of) Visual Studio's GUI editor, but there is a visual, drag-and-drop GUI editor included with the Android SDK. It may require that you use Eclipse.

Hey, it's what I've heard. My own experiences with MS's GUI tools were that they (and all third-party offerings) at the time (Visual Studio a few years back) sucked pretty bad. I mean even compared to Apple's tools from a couple of years before that.

I suppose right now the whole subject for mobile is kind of moot. If you want any chance at making any type of money (and that's not guaranteed), you develop for the iPhone/iPod. If you want decent income on another platform you have to make something for a vertical market and then hope to get a big corporate contract. There's pretty much no point to retail for an indy developer on any other platform at the moment.

I think the non-iPhone argument is that you've got less competition. There may be five hundred iFart apps on the iPhone, so your ability to crack that market (hehe, crack) is nil, but you could have a shot at being the #1 fart sound generator on Android.

Also, by going with a non-iPhone platform, you may have a better shot of attracting helpful attention from one of the phone network vendors (e.g., Verizon) who might say "wow, your fart generator is fantastic; we'd like to include it on every phone and pay you a stack of cash." That's just not happening with Apple.

Fart jokes aside, another benefit of non-iPhone platforms is that you can gleefully violate all the rules that Apple enforces on what you can and can't do. If you want to do a better mail client or a better web browser, knock yourself out.

I'm not sure I know of a better mail client being denied from the app store. There are many better browsers available though.

I concur with the theory, but the reality is that the other platforms don't have a meaningful number of customers nor any significant momentum in the app sales channel. It might make sense to port something if it's easy, but I'm not sure I'd be willing to invest time unless it was under contract. Apparently a lot of other people must feel the same way judging by what's out there now.

We still need to hear a lot more from MS on their strategy in this space. I just read something the other day that mentioned they'd be in a position similar to Apple in 2007 where only approved, high-level "partners" would be writing native apps for the new Windows Phone. Anyone else have any concrete news on this subject?

Windows Phone OS, that contracts nicely!

Apparently Microsoft are now going to concentrate on Windows Phone 7, having just killed their new Kin product line. I'm still not sure how that total POS ever made it to market in the first place, but I suppose Microsoft loves to throw money out the window. I really wish they didn't, then perhaps my Microsoft stock would be worth more than it was when I bought it (and it was a looong time ago).

EDIT: Here's some backstory on how the Kin was doomed long before it was even announced: http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/30/what-killed-the-kin/

Microsoft is eventually going to stumble so hard they'll have a hard time standing back up again. They need to realize that they're a software company and not a Windows company.

The most intriguing part of that story was the idea that Windows CE, itself, may be in trouble, with Microsoft considering unifying everything about "Windows 8." Presumably, if Apple can shoehorn OS X into a phone, then Microsoft can shoehorn some variant of WinNT as well.

Meanwhile, Nokia's done a deal with Intel on this whole MeeGo thing, and that leaves you wondering where Microsoft's supposed to end up. Thinking aloud, and with absolutely zero inside information, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Microsoft bought RIM. It almost makes sense. Blackberries are the predominant way that corporate types access their Exchange servers from the road. If Microsoft controlled that, then they could build out a corporate platform that latches into customers who won't go running away just because the competition has a shiny new phone.

If they were smart, they'd then leave RIM alone while developing a super-duper new Windows-based platform, rather than the way they blew it with the Sidekick platform, as the Engadget article spells out.

Backup? Whats a backup? We don't need any backups!

Wow, finally. That Kin thing was an interesting experiment, but it seems that Microsoft were the only ones who couldn't see its inevitable failure.

It's sad that the Kin made it through and the Courier did not.

There was a great Engadget podcast a month or two ago, where Josh got into a somewhat heated debate with Engadget's friend, analyst Michael Gartenberg. Gartenberg insisted that the Kin phones would be huge, and catch on like crazy. Josh represented all sane listeners in the argument, and was astonished at the assertion. Looks like as usual the analyst didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

I tell ya, I want to know how to become an analyst. It seems I have to three things in order to do so:
1) predict things that will obviously come true
2) occasionally predict something out of left field
3) every so often predict the iPhone will come to Verizon

Anyway, sorry to get off topic. I celebrate Kin's death. The ONLY thing cool about those phones was that they were the first Zune phones. But that will be meaningless when the Phone 7 phones come out.

I did get hands on with the Kin phones at a Verizon store a few weeks ago. The hardware felt a little clunky, but like something a teen might carry. The screens, however, were pretty bad, with low pixel density and low brightness. In fact, it really seemed like the brightness was turned way down on the Kin 2 I tried, but despite about 5 minutes of fiddling with it, I couldn't for the life of me find a settings menu to change the screen brightness. I had thought these phones were for idiot teenagers, and here I was overly frustrated that I couldn't find a basic user experience setting.

Fail.

The Kin phones are what you get if you let somebody who is obsessed with the idea of "Web2.0", clouds and social networking design a phone but not actually have any experience of phones or UI design. The social networking parts are clunky and have an awful interface.

If Microsoft hadn't actually released it, I would have assumed that the two Kin phones were concept phones.

There is a setting to disable the light sensor and do manual brightness.

I don't really see Microsoft buying RIM. If they did, I think it would only lead to the death of the Blackberry, so it would just be another huge money pit for MS. It would probably be a good idea, for the reasons Dan mentioned, but that's also why I don't see it happening. MS are too Windows-centric, I'm sure their toilet paper is covered in WIndows logos. I can't see them doing with RIM anything much different than they did with the Sidekick, that is, redeploying it with a new OS.

MS would be better off abandoning the NT kernel and everything in its current iterations of Windows and going at it with something new and fresh. That's the path they need to take if they really want to copy Apple. Not buying up hundreds of Macs to study its UI for ideas to toss into Windows as eye-candy.

It was obvious to everyone that not even teens were going to go for the Kin, since most of them had also long ago abandoned the Sidekick for iPhone, Android or Blackberry. And no one, even someone not in their right mind, is going to give up one of those for a Kin.

I suspect that may be more to do with how far from reality the courier "demo reels" were.

People seem to think that courier was really doing all that stuff on the bench, whereas the far more likely reality was that the courier project had these amazing goals but it was nowhere near the concepts. Remember the courier pictures of two windows mobile devices glued into a leather folio from 2009?

If you were as cynical as me, you might think that the concept videos were leaked by the courier team to try and drum up some customer "pull" that would help them get internal support to enlarge their team 10x to actually make the product's functionality approach the demo.

On what Microsoft should or shouldn't do: Microsoft took a big gamble with the NT kernel, ultimately killing the Win9x line, and that was clearly a good thing by the time they got to WinXP, with many people still running it some nine years after its release. With modern smartphone hardware, there's no reason Microsoft couldn't move NT onto a smartphone in precisely the way that Apple moved OS X. (I'll argue that there's nothing wrong with the NT kernel, but rather with the behemoth environment that's grown up around it. Android has done what looks to be a nice job of redoing the Linux userland without monkeying with the kernel, so far as I can tell.)

Of course, as you point out, Microsoft seems to have this thing about producing products that have their own software stack from top to bottom. For example, there was their famous effort to move Hotmail to a Windows platform, and Kin can be seen as moving Danger to a Windows platform. Microsoft could well have left both of those alone and focused on evolving things on their original platform, but they didn't.

Mostly I just see Kin as a spectacular management failure.

Ahh, one other point. Kin may well have stood a chance if you weren't required to have the $30/mo. data plan. For contrast, Verizon just introduced the Pantech Jest, which is available free with new contract and without any data plan at all. Assuming the software's any good, this could well be quite popular with the teenage set.

There's nothing wrong with the NT kernel. All of the cruft is in the Win32 layer on top.

Oh don't get me wrong, I never thought it was a functioning product.

I've agreed with the general consensus that the Courier might have just been too difficult to bring to reality from concept. The user interface they were displaying was certainly ambitious and not a simple feat to pull off.

Still, I wish they'd tried, and the rumor is that J Allard was pissed that they didn't. I don't know if he quit over it or not, but I think they're going to miss him.

Well, the actual launch is getting close, anyone here looking at a Windows Phone 7 phone? (Gah, even the shortened name still seems awkward, guess I should use device instead)

I'm still pretty curious to see how the phone works in person, but I don't see myself owning one. I doubt Microsoft is going to bring any of the sync software to the Mac, and even if the phone is the next best thing, it's not going to be good enough to drag me away from OS X.

Google appears to already be concerned about it, based on comments they have made. Seems odd to me to make a comment like "the world doesn't need another platform". The same could have been said back when Android (pre iPhone era) was just another platform to compete against RIM, the old Windows Mobile, the old Palm OS, and Symbian as a business smartphone.

The whole quote from Google is absolutely ridiculous. :



You create a new platform because

a) you think you can do it better
b) you want to make money.
c) you can leverage existing technology and skill sets to make more content available.

. . . just like Google did.

Where MS thinks they can do it better (based on their people interviewing on podcasts) is they feel it helps everyone to build a developer-centric app creation process and store, rather than a consumer driven one. I have my doubts as to whether this approach will even touch the existing smart phones, but it will be interesting to see. I have little doubt that Silverlight will be the best and easiest way to create smart phone apps. XAML + C# is a powerful, powerful combination. IMO, C# surpassed Java a long time ago in terms of the best laid out general purpose language, and XAML is absolutely awesome for building content presentation. I'm not certain on the specifics of what they are planning to do with the store, but the claim is that it will be easier for consumers to "find your app" and for developers to be rewarded for creating great stuff.

I guess the notion is that this will allow the best apps to be created for the windows phone (much like windows desktop has a richer library of available applications than Apple, even if Apple continues to win in certain markets such as sound engineering and graphics), but that might not work for phones the way it worked for desktops. The problems with this line of thinking are:

a) The iPhone has a huge head start on great apps
b) Android's Java is still the most popular development language
c) Running apps, while very important, is not the core feature of a phone.

As a developer, the idea of creating content and being rewarded for it excites me, especially since I can leverage skills I already have. In fact, I probably WILL look into writing a windows phone app once I have time to breath in my current work project (and I can be confident people are actually buying these phones and creating a market for the software). Unfortunately, as consumer it will be very hard to drag me off of my iPhone, and that's the rub I think.

A funny thing is that the project I'm currently on is a banking product and part of what we are building is a monitoring/trouble shooting tool that graphically represent the health of our back-end process and allows us to correct certain error states. This is currently built in WPF, but it would not be difficult at all to change to Silverlight and make the app available for a Windows phone. Once the system goes live each of the developers will be on call during banking hours, so having this application available on our phones would be a HUGE win. This means there's a chance we could end up with company owned Windows phones (right now they pay for my iPhone service). As cool as that would be, I'm not sure I desire it because that would mean giving up my beloved iPhone.

I agree with just about everything apart from this:

For lots of the iPhone users that I know, apps very much are the core of using the "phone". How people use an iPhone in my experience is very different to how they use non smartphones.

I don't really know how this compares to other smart phone users, because I know very few smart phone users who aren't using iPhones...

1. Andy Rubin from Google is a total douche and a completely disingenuous person. He's working for the perfect company, since that's Google motto.

2. Microsoft's OS is great news for everyone other than Google - if anyone is going to lose market share to MS it will be Google. The MS phone simply doesn't compete with RIM and Apple's products for OEM attention. It's going to help create confusion both in product execution and delivery for OEMs and it's going to create branding and market confusion for consumers for those OEM's products- good news for Apple and RIM.

3. I don't see the road ahead paved with fantastic apps for MS Phone. I see the potential for a lot of crap given history and the ease of development with new tools. You make something too easy and people are going to take a very easy/lax approach to quality as well.

Step 1. Create a marketing page showing off the platform including a blurb about apps. Make sure to grab icons from popular apps on other platforms to hint at what is coming soon.
Step 2. ?
Step 3. Profit

Or rather in this case, upset the developer because his icon was used without permission when said developer hadn't even decided on porting the game to the platform. Oops.

Hopefully those developers from the podcasts go and smack the marketing people.

I'm an Android user (well I will be when my HTC Desire comes back from repair), and I very rarely use it for making phone calls. That said: if it's lousy (like WinMo lousy) at making the few phone calls that I do make, it's not going to stay in my pocket for long.

This is certainly true- I was amazed myself how my experience with my iPhone was completly different than with a blackberry curve, which I mostly just used for phone and email. The apps are a HUGE part of what makes the iPhone magical.

But I only realized this AFTER buying my iPhone. My perception befor jumping into iPhone land was that apps were simply "nice to haves". In that sense (the mind of a new customer), the quality of apps in the store would probably not sway my purchasing decision the way they would a desktop OS.

I'd forgotten for a second how lousy my WinMo phones were at making calls and sending texts. The iPhone might not be as good as my old Nokias when it came to being a phone, but it is many times more usable as a phone than those WinMo phones I suffered with.

A lot of crap does not mean no fantastic apps. If users can connect with the quality apps (something that is part of the MS strategy), then the number of poor apps is beside the point.

And I don't really know that Silverlight is "too easy". You have to know what you are doing (like with most other platforms). If you do, then it is very powerful.

But beyond that- it isn't about how easy or difficult Silverlight is. There are plenty of developers out there who already possess skills with WPF and Silverlight- these developers will be able to instantly translate those skills to the new phone and get cracking creating visually stunning apps. One of the TAs on our current project is already doing this in his off time (building a chord finder app for musicians) and will be ready to go soon after the phone ships. For him, the real bonus is getting to leverage the skills he already has.

The problem, of course, is that if no one is interested in the phone his app won't sell

The same was true for me. I bought the iPhone before there were any real apps. The base functionality was great, especially the built in real web browser and proper HTML e-mail. It was only later that value was added with tons of third party apps. This is why when I did my Android experiment, I wanted the first part of it to be focused on what the core experience was. For me, it wasn't better then the core experience of the iPhone, and due to serious issues like the GPS, the phone went back before I even dug into the app market.

If I were to consider a Windows Phone 7 device, the core experience has to be solid. Once that part is proven, then the apps start making the device even more useful. It seems like Microsoft did put a lot of effort into the core, so it's something that looks promising to me.

It will be interesting to see how this shapes up. Android and Windows Phone 7 take the same approach of offering a platform on a ton of varied devices made by third parties. This mirrors the current Windows PC market today, but that market only exists in it's current form due to Microsoft's illegal actions in the 90s. With real competition this time around, I'm watching to see how this plays out. Google is going with the more open approach for OEMs and carriers to change what they want, Microsoft is being a little more controlling this time compared to their older Windows Mobile attempts.

Apple, RIM, and HP (Palm) are on the other side, providing the platform and the hardware as one single piece. So far, this approach has worked well for both Apple and RIM, and may work for PalmOS now that they have a large company to help push forward the marketing message.

Not only do consumers have choice in the mobile space, they have choices even inside the different strategies.

I am.
1. I love Zune way more than any iPod I own, and if (IF) MS succeeds in creating a UI just as good for a phone, I'd love to use it. And I'd use 1 device only as phone/music player. But, sadly, they'll only make devices with little 32Gb storage, at least initially, I am afraid, which will make it no replacement for my Zune, should I ever decide to get one soon.

2. I need it for work. I need to sync, daily, w/o issues, with my Outlook. This is a must for me. No way Android or iPhone could do this as well as my old and slow Palm Treo 750. And I have no intention to go through Gmail or whatever.

3. I've had and "tested" iPhone and Android a bit, and never got into the "Apps" thing. They're nice and cool, I had fun with some of them, but I only ended up using the one that "recognizes songs". I even forgot its name. I know that if I used those phones longer I would have done much more with Apps. But, honestly, that's way down in my priority list. And, it seems, the song-recognising app will be in WP7.

4. It seems some WP7 devices with real, physical qwerty keyboard will be available at some point (Samsung? LG? Can't remember). I'd love that. No touch-screen keyboard I've tried feels as nice as the one on my Palm Treo 750. No, not even the iPhone one.

Of course, I'll try WP7. I like a lot what I saw so far on line, but it may turn into something poor in reality. In which case I won't know what to do and if my Treo's keyboard keeps breaking (yes, it feels great but it is getting progressively worse in accepting key-presses. Its terrible.) I may have to resort to accept the "stupid" RIM I would get at work otherwise. And wait that Android improves to do what I want (likely, at some point), or that the iPhone does (unfortunately very unlikely).

Oh, and I need tethering. Unlocked. What happened with that? Is Android doing it, no limits, no carrier-lock, and what not? Is Apple? This has been so discouraging for me in thinking to change phone... Windows Mobile has been doing this forever and it "just worked" for me over the last three years, and Nokia did it great before that. I've been tethering for the last 8 years, and I just don't want to change to something that doesn't do it any longer. Which, incredible, could even be WM7 itself, based on what I read months ago. But I just did not have time to look into this, so maybe now all of them do happily?!

Works fine for me under Android for mail and calendar, without going through Gmail.

Well, to be fair, it syncs with Exchange. I use Outlook as little as possible. I try to use Exchange as little as possible, honestly.


There are a variety of Android phones with physical keyboards, both horizontally and vertically aligned. Or do you need one that isn't a slide-away deal? If that's the case, the only one I know of is the Motorola Charm, which is a MOTOBLUR phone, which is to say, Android Jr.

Even better, the Droid Pro