Windows Phone 7 Could Shake Things Up
Microsoft has got our attention, says Peter Judge. Now we need to be sure that Windows Phone 7’s tiles are properly grouted
The launch of Windows Phone really could not have gone much better for Microsoft. It seems the company has a phone which users will want – but the question remains, how well it will filter through operators to the market.
The words “self-deprecating” don’t normally fit Microsoft, and certainly not its CEO Steve Ballmer, but after Ballmer launched Windows Phone 7 in New York, the UK event was remarkably low key, up to a certain point.
Welcome to the underdog
In New York, Ballmer was bellowing bizarre slogans (“Always delightful! Wonderfully mine!”), but the satellite link was taken down, and in London, he was replaced on stage by Andrew Lees, Microsoft’s president of mobile communications.
When Lees took the job, he told the audience, one of our eWEEK US colleagues said “Microsoft should hire Bozo the clown to run Windows Mobile. At least the antics would be funny.” Lees said that probably made him a clown, and then proceeded with some matter of fact product details, operator announcements and demonstrations.
After that demonstration, Microsoft general manager Ashley Highfield read out a quote comparing Windows Mobile 6 with depressing grey 1960s architecture, wondered whether the writer had changed his mind, and introduced him – Stephen Fry.
That was the moment the new operating system got a real endorsement. Stephen Fry apparently doomed BlackBerry’s Storm phone with a single tweet, and here he was, on the loose, live, unpaid and unscripted… and giving the new OS a kind and generous welcome, albeit as an underdog.
Tiles that need grouting?
After the presentations, the possible holes came through. The user interface is based on “hubs”, which are displayed through “tiles” which turn out to be what might otherwise be called “widgets” – big icons with active content.
It is indeed a new way to see stuff on a phone, and may be an improvement over picking through screens of apps, as one has to do on the iPhone and Android. Symbian is still working on its next version, and will have to do something pretty good to top this.
The presentation of email was good, and the ability to handle Microsoft documents also seems impressive.
But the demonstrations skipped any web browsing, they didn’t show location features, and they didn’t show Flash – because at the launch, the phone doesn’t yet do Flash. It seems possible the tiles need some grouting, and the hubs may need oiling.
Operator customisation
Nor did we see any operator customisation, which may be a key factor for the future. Operators want to customise the phone – and if they get the chance they will customise it so hard they throttle the user experience (as happened with Vodafone 360).
Microsoft has a tough line to hold here. It wants operators to love it, but it also wants to enforce a unified user interface, to actually gather user support for the OS, much as Google has done with Android and Apple with the iPhone.
At the same time, however, it’s got its own services and standards to push – so this phone has very good integration with Zune, Xbox, Windows Live and Office.
Can Microsoft hold out against forces from operators – and from within Microsoft itself – that might push this sort of integration too far?
It seems from the launch so far, that there are some rough edges, and the $400 million marketing machine hasn’t yet got into gear. When it does, this could get interesting.
