Ballmer locked and loaded for WinMo 7 debut Monday looks like the day when Microsoft plans to finally unveil its Windows Mobile comeback, challenging Google's Android and the Apple iPhone. According to reports, the company is planning to use the opening day of the GSM Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain to publicly show off what has, until now, been called Windows …
People don't buy phones that run Android, they buy Android phones. The iPhone of course is the logical conclusion of this idea- OS and hardware are inseparable.
Basically, people don't think about OSes on their phones, so "Windows Phone" makes sense as a hardware+software package.
Except when your OS has such a negative brand image. Probably the best that Microsoft could hope to do would be to introduce a stellar product that would hook OEMs disenfranchised with Android, and carefully hide their logo from the end user. In the current environment of over-hyped enthusiasm for Android and iWhatever, Windows Phone is likely to be as well received as, say, VMS Mobile...
While I am quite happy with S60, iPhoneOS or Android (and probably Maemo soon), I actively avoid WinMo, having been unlucky enough to be lumbered with it in the past.
It's a situation where I was made to care about my mobile phone's OS. Yuck.
Paris because we don't have a "Sweaty Ballmer cavorting and screaming 'give it up for ME'" icon. Thank goodness.
It will be a monumental failure, because it hasn't got the OEMs and ODMs on side, and it hasn't got the software developers on side.
There are only 2 handsets in the making, one from HTC and one from LG. Developers have already abandoned Windows Mobille, which is why there's only a pitiful 700 English apps that work with WM6.5 on Microsoft's Mobile Marketplace app store.
Developers are angry about Microsoft plans to lock down Windows Mobile 7 and make it a closed platform, where you can only buy apps from Microsoft, and not any 3rd party. Microsoft will have a vetting and approval process of apps.
OEM vendors are on MS's side and still pushing WinMo's, the majority of HTC's phones are Win, Android is the exception.
The App store on WinMo is new. It has been around for a matter of months. It's significant for the Iphone because it's the only way you can install new programs on the phone, thanks to the Apple walled garden. How do you think apps were installed on WinMo phones before the app store was available? 1000's of downloadable apps on the internet that's how.
Microsoft are not locking down the phone, they would only do that if they produced hardware. They need to allow the vendors to customise the phones to suit, and they do, just look at the HTC front end software.
The only reason this might change is if MS produce a Zune-phone. Otherwise, brace yourself for Windows Mobile 7 for years to come.
Is that "challenge" in the same sense that Zune was a "challenge" to the iPod? Or that Bing is a challenge to Google?
Realistically, Microsoft have had their lead, and squandered it. I mean when your phone user interface is so bad that your major hardware partner has to skin it over with their own software....
The Other Steve saw the opening and launched the iPhone. Despite being in the mobile business for a decade Microsoft can't even beat off upstart competitors like Google.
Seriously no one has the first clue about whats going to happen, MS dont need to lock Windows to a phone, all they have to do is give a " Windows Designed" sticker to hardware manufactures if the hardware meets there aproval. HTC have a huge WM hardware base they will make what sells money.
The only real question is compatability, software makers will be unlikely to re design software to a major extent because the code base is completely different, so, if things are different and it needs a complete redesign it would be a shame because thats the only real advantage they have over the other two.
IT specialist, you dont know that, you dont know how many devices are in the making, you dont know what the software is going to support and what its going to be like, you say developers have abandoned WM because there is only 700 apps on the marketplace, please remember the market is very new, and almost all software for WM is sold else where on the internet and in shops, you say Developers are angry about locking down the platform, but again, you have no idea what is going to happen, everything you have read has been taken form a few sources that do not actually say anything as fact, its all speculation, unlike apple, MS can be quite good at keeping things away if they try hard enough.
Im not saying your rong, maybe they will lock it down tighter than a ducks arse but the simple fact is, we dont know.
My main concern is that upto now windows mobile isnt so vendor locked in as iphone or how android. The main problem I have with iphone and android is that you end up being pushed to do things the apple way or the google way. I want my phone to work MY way not apple's microsoft's or google's!
"I want my phone to work MY way not apple's microsoft's or google's!" I don't see this available even today. So - it would seem that you have a few of choices.
1) Give up mobile phones.
2) Grow up, stop your whining and then pick the phone that is closest to what you want/need.
3) Build your own phone (hardware and software). (Good luck with that.)
Otherwise your post is just a bunch of uninformed bluster.
The problem is quite simple, contracts are getting longer and WinMo OEMs won't give you a major update to your handset's firmware for nothing as they have to pay a licence fee to Microsoft.
So for the duration of your contract you might be on a buggy build of the OS or be missing out on a new release. Unless of course you want to install a homebrew ROM.
On the iPhone you get updates, some of them major upgrades for years. There has yet to be an iPhone OS release that hasn't been made available for the original 2G version, nearly three years from its original release.
In WinMo land you have to keep buying handsets to get upgrades, since the OEMs don't make any money on the software.
If running a smartphone the open source way is the only road to go, the walled gardens of MS and Apple remind me of 1990's CompusServe and America Online...no thanks... Android, and now maybe the FOSS'ed Symbian, are going to own 90% of this market within 2-3 years. The last 10% will be MS and Apple fans that take branding over functionality.
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