Microsoft chose the Mobile World Congress to launch details of its new Windows Mobile platform, now to be named Windows Phone 7 Series, as CEO Steve Ballmer gave details of operator wins and its radical new feature set, including Xbox Live gaming and Zune class media player.
The latest Windows Mobile operating system was always expected to be a radical departure from the past for Microsoft, adding proper touch screen support and giving its legendary developers the opportunity to slug it out toe to toe with the App Stores from Apple and others.
Ballmer described the operating system as a completely fresh approach to phone software, which has smarter design and integrated content driven experiences. Microsoft says that partners have already started building phones and customers will be able to buy them by holiday season 2010, a full 3 months earlier than most had thought.
‘Today, I’m proud to introduce Windows Phone 7 Series, the next generation of Windows Phones,’ said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer at Microsoft. ‘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. Windows Phone 7 Series marks a turning point toward phones that truly reflect the speed of people’s lives and their need to connect to other people and all kinds of seamless experiences.’
Microsoft is slugging it out with Android, Symbian and other pretenders to the phone OS, to remain in touch with the Apple platform, and remain relevant to modern handsets. Like Nokia, Microsoft had been left behind with the fast moving capacitive touch screen approach that was introduced by Apple and which is now typified on most Android devices. The industry is split between seeing this as Microsoft’s last hurrah, after which it will disappear into obscurity, or the first time Microsoft has realized what’s at stake, which has made it abandon the outmoded Windows look and feel.
The HTC range of phones, in particular the existing HD2 which launched this week with T-Mobile USA, have shown what can be achieved if you hide the Windows interface and unleash the full gesture touch experience that the iPhone is famous for. HTC is likely to lead the charge again on Windows Phone 7.
Mobile operators that are backing the new operating system with at least one phone include AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, the big four in the USA, as well as Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica, T-Mobile and Telecom Italia ‘ the biggest European international carriers.
Device makers such as Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC, HP, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Qualcomm will all offer the operating system and in Qualcomm’s case it also announced at the show that it will be supporting Windows on its Snapdragon processors, ARM based devices which are expected to lead the push towards smartbooks ‘ iPad class devices, halfway between the smartphone and the netbook. So expect 10 hours battery life, internet tablets to come out with this OS.
The OS will support the dynamic update of real time information feeds, using ‘live tiles’ which it says is an innovation not yet ready on other operating systems. This can be used for share price or news feeds, but also for tracking social network updates.
But Microsoft will also use the devices to fight back against Google and Nokia’s search capabilities, with a hardware button to load the Bing search engine and local search based around Bing. Given the poor performance of Google Maps outside of the US, we would guess that this is based on Nokia’s Navteq database, which has accurate information in around 40 countries and rising and which Nokia recently decided to give away for free on its top end devices.
Windows Phone 7 will also bring in an idea it calls ‘Hubs’ which drags content types which are related, from the Web, on-board applications and cloud services, into a single view. This is like releasing the application framework for offering a single view for all forms of messaging ‘ IM, SMS, Email ‘ which has been appearing on many phones recently ‘ and giving it to the developers to play with. But Microsoft has pre-configured a number of these hubs – six are ready made around People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace and Office. So at least one of them still harks back to the biggest mistake that Microsoft ever made, that of bringing its PC applications to the phone ‘ something that puts most people off buying a windows phone.
The games hub offers an official route into Xbox LIVE including actual games to play, as well as the ability look at other gamers’ avatars, achievements and profiles. The music and video functions borrow from the experience of the Zune architecture and allows the sharing of content between a PC and a Windows phone in the same way that Zune was connected to a PC.
It was only back in October that Microsoft boasted the first in the line of previous generation Windows phones, using Windows Mobile 6.5, but these are now likely also to be the last, which it used to keep top three US carriers happy while they kept the faith and waited for Windows Phone 7.
The bulk of those older devices came from HTC, ZTE and Samsung, with Motorola promising it would be in the lineup once Windows 7.0 was announced, and all of these suppliers, plus LG, a big Windows fan, are expected to back the new OS. All of which makes the phone OS wars once again too close to call.