The smartphone race thus far has been a three-pony show: Apple's iPhone, Research In Motion's BlackBerry and Google's Android devices.
Microsoft and Nokia, two of the bigger players in the pre-iPhone days, have been trailing the new generation of devices badly.
With mobility representing the future, that's not a position either company wants to be in. As such, Microsoft is hoping to reverse its fortunes with a completely redesigned mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7.
The initial lineup goes on sale in North America on Nov. 8. In Canada, Telus is offering two phones, the LG Optimus and the HTC 7, Bell will have the LG Optimus Quantum and Rogers will have the Samsung Focus, although no one has announced pricing yet.
For my review I used the Focus, whose main selling point is its bright, four-inch (10.16-centimetre) touch screen. For all intents and purposes, it's the same as Samsung's snazzy and light Galaxy phones.
It's obvious as soon as you turn the Windows phone on that Microsoft is trying hard to differentiate its devices. Rather than use the same grid-like organization system for apps as its competitors, the Windows interface is vertical and made up of square "tiles."
Each tile is an app that takes you to your email, calendar, phone and so on.
Some of the tiles take you to "hubs," or repositories of certain information. The "Now" hub, for example, contains weather, news headlines and stock market happenings. The "People" hub can be set up to show contacts and Facebook updates.
Moving between tiles and hubs is fun, thanks to the slick animated way they flow on and off the screen. Text menus in places such as the Marketplace app store are large and organized in an elegant vertical fashion, much like Microsoft's less-than-successful Zune music device.
Mobile Word, Excel
Besides the novel interface, Microsoft has also tried to differentiate its phones by providing a decent mobile version of its key Office programs. Word and Excel let you create documents on the phone, while PowerPoint lets you view and edit presentations, and you can store all of them with Microsoft's SharePoint online feature.
These apps go beyond just simple text inputting and are surprisingly feature rich, even if they are stripped-down versions of the desktop software. In Word, you can bold, underline and highlight your text, while in Excel you can apply filters and formulas to cells.
In further trying to make Windows Phone 7 different, Microsoft is leveraging something it does quite well: video games. As with the People and Now hubs, there's an Xbox Live hub where you can buy and download games. There are some fun games available, such as the original Frogger, but the offerings are pretty limited for now.
Given its strong existing relationships with game developers, it's safe to assume Microsoft won't have much trouble adding to this feature and improving it.
When it comes to other apps, however, it's another story. Windows Phone 7's biggest weakness, when compared with rivals, is its app ecosystem. Microsoft is promising to have 1,000 apps available at launch — a veritable drop in the bucket, compared with Android's 100,000 and Apple's 300,000.
That means Windows phones are going to be considerably less customizable, a capability that many would argue has been the main selling point of iPhones and Android devices. Whether Microsoft can persuade app developers to create software for its phones, and how quickly they can be added, remains to be seen.
No 'cut-and-paste' feature
Microsoft's phones are also lacking a few key features that are pretty much standard with its rivals. Most notably, there's no cut-and-paste ability, a bizarre omission — especially in Word. It also can't tether. That is, you can't connect the phone to your laptop and use it as a modem.Microsoft has also failed to capitalize on the dissatisfaction with Apple and its public war against Adobe's Flash, the software that enables a good portion of the web's video and multimedia capabilities. Google is taking advantage of the iPhone's lack of Flash support and is adding it to Android phones, a move that Microsoft would have been smart to emulate.
The Windows phone's Internet Explorer web browser is just as good as those on rivals' devices, but it would have been better had it incorporated Flash.
In the end, Windows Phone 7 is a huge step forward for Microsoft, compared with previous Windows phones, but it falls short of its rivals. Other than a neat — and very different — interface and some promise in games, Microsoft hasn't yet presented that one killer reason to buy its phones over the others.
I'm therefore not sure who will buy it. Business types are married to BlackBerry, iPhone has the cool cachet and Android is proving popular with people who just don't like Apple. There doesn't seem to be much room for Microsoft to wiggle in.
One possible ploy would be to price Windows phones significantly below the others, but that's an unlikely scenario since nobody — least of all Microsoft — wants to be seen as the cheap brand in any market.
Windows Phone 7 is a solid start, but Microsoft is still going to be playing catch-up for the foreseeable future.
Mobile is a market the company can't afford to let slip away, and it does have loads of cash to throw at the effort. Ultimately, it's good for everyone if Microsoft can become a solid competitor to the likes of Apple, RIM and Google, because it'll mean increasingly better phones from everyone.
0 comments:
Post a Comment