You can download the Windows Phone 7 SDK right now from this link. Make us some good stuff, programmers. [Windows Phone Developer]

Windows Phone 7 Series: It’s a thing! And it looks pretty great, so far. Last month’s announcement, though, left a lot of questions. Questions which are answered here, in Gizmodo’s live updated coverage of Microsoft’s MIX 2010 keynote.

How exactly will multitasking work? What about those incredible cross platform game demos? Whither WinMo 6.x, and its devs? (And what’s with this “Classic” and “Starter Edition” business?) What happens to the Zune? Will we see more hardware? What about the mysterious Chassis 3? Why are developers already worried? We’ve got at least an hour here, folks, so expect answers. Lots of answers.

New Features

When we met Windows Phone 7 Series, it was all about taking a first look. But we really didn’t get a great idea as to how the operating system works, underneath the Zune-like skin. Here’s are the new OS and dev features Microsoft’s announced today.

• A Push Notification Service: Called the “Microsoft Notification Service,” this sounds an awful lot like Apple’s push notification system, which lends credence to the interpretation of Microsoft’s talk about multitasking as meaning that it doesn’t really exist, or that it’s at least heavily managed. As you can see above, they pop up in a small tray at the top of the screen, rather than the obnoxious pop-up system that the iPhone uses.

• A Microsoft Location Service: This is like a clearing house for location data, or “single point of reference to acquire location information.” This is more of a developer tool than anything else, I think, but it suggest location service’s being totally and easily accessible, and not just in terms of raw data. This is basically just Bing everywhere, in both user and developer terms.

• Silverlight, Silverlight, Silverlight: Windows Phone 7 apps are largely developed in Silverlight, which you probably only know as that plugin you had to install that one time to watch the Olympics. It can also create apps that are significantly more complicated than video players.

• Dev Tools Will Be Free: Windows Phone 7 development tools for Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Blend (a UI dev tool) will be free to download.

• App Developers Can Start Today: The free tools are available at developer.windowsphone.com, as of right now. While developers won’t have phones for a while, they’ll have the PC emulator, which even allows for touchscreen input. (If you have a touchscreen PC, of course.)

• No Mac Dev Support: And yeah, of course, there’s no development on Mac.

The Marketplace

We didn’t even get to to see the new Windows Phone Marketplace in action in February, but now Microsoft’s pulled the curtain back.

• It’s Panoramic: It’s going to look like the rest of Windows Phone 7, which is to say, it’s going to be swipey and zoomy and all those things that made Windows Phone 7 interesting looking. You know, hubs within hubs within hubs within hubs. Hubs!

• Buying options: It’ll handle one-time credit card purchases, operator billing, and ad-supported apps.

• App trials: Microsoft is going to require developers to allow buyers to trial apps before buying them. Good for us, potentially scary for devs. UPDATE: It’s not actually a requirement, just an option. What this is, really, is an old-school app trial system: You use an app until your dev-defined trial is over, or until you get tired of the missing features, then you buy it, which instantly activates the remaining functionality, no extra download required.

• The Zune Client: You can browse the Marketplace from the Zune client, like you can access the App Store from iTunes. This gives Windows Phone 7 a leg up over the likes of Android and webOS, which limit app installation to the handset. But! The Zune software is Windows-only.

This doesn’t just mean you won’t be able to install apps from your desktop your phone on Windows Phone 7, it means that you won’t be able to sync anything with your desktop, be it music, movies or photos. And there’s no USB syncing outside of the Zune software client, so you can’t just dump media onto your phone, mass storage style. In other words, if you don’t have a PC, you can’t really listen to your music or watch your videos on your WinPho 7 phone.

• Multitasking: Like we’d said before, it’s really not there. There will be certain provisions for multitasking—music is the one Microsoft is talking about now, for app like Pandora—but there won’t be pure multitasking. (You won’t, for example, be able to run Skype or a Twitter app in the background. So, again, this is an Apple-like approach for the least Apple-like company in existence.)

&bull Copy and Paste: The current build doesn’t have it, back at launch, word was that it might not ever show up on the platform. Now, Engadget’s hearing the the final build may not be able to take text from here and put it there. This omission would be more curious, because there’s really no upside, as in the case of limiting multitasking. Also: What the hell? Also also: They’ve got at least six months to fix this.

• Only two resolution will be allowed: For the foreseeable future, Microsoft’s only allowing two resolutions—the 800×480 WVGA resolution we’ve seen on the first hardware already, and later, a 480×320 HVGA resolution—for Windows Phone 7 handsets. Developers will only have to write for two screen sizes, which helps keep developing for the platform relatively simple.

• Windows Mobile 6.x Apps Won’t Work: Scott Guthrie confirmed to us that 6.x apps would need to be ported in order to work, and that this may not be a simple process—you could, for example, carry over some interface assets, or some core .NET programming from one platform to the other, but there’ll be no simple patch from one platform to the other.

The First Apps

The first round of app partners is solid, for sure:

AWS Convergence Technologies ? WeatherBug, Citrix Systems Inc., Clarity Consulting Inc., Cypress Consulting, EA Mobile, Fandango Inc., Foursquare Labs Inc., frog design inc., Glu Mobile Inc., Graphic.ly, Hudson Entertainment Inc., IdentityMine Inc., IMDb.com Inc., Larva Labs, Match.com LLC, Matchbox Mobile Ltd., Microsoft Game Studios, Namco Networks America Inc., Oberon Media Inc., Pageonce Inc., Pandora Media Inc., Photobucket Inc., PopCap Games Inc., Seesmic, Shazam Entertainment Ltd., Sling Media, SPB Software Inc., stimulant, TeleCommunications Systems Inc., Touchality LLC and Vertigo Software Inc

We also got our first glimpse at the apps, which maintain the Windows Phone 7 aesthetic surprisingly well.

The first batch gives a preview of what Windows Phone 7 apps will be—that is to say, deeply integrated. Another instant reaction? A lot of these developers write for the iPhone and Android, which is a good sign and a bad one: A good one, because Microsoft needs these guys to reach anything resembling app parity with other platforms; and a bad one, because it drives home just how much catching up Microsoft is going to have to do come WinPho 7’s release. None of the other platforms, for what it’s worth, have paps as pretty as some of these—a point that’s really driven home when you see their 3D transforms and animations in motion:

With others, like Hush Hush, you can see that Microsoft is open to modal interfaces as well, which is to say, interfaces that look nothing like Zune or Windows Phone 7.

Since Windows Phone 7 apps are developed largely in Silverlight, you can download and incorporate Silverlight libraries that already exist. In other words, some of the interface elements, animations and icons that you’ve gotten used to seeing in Silverlight app interfaces might turn up in Windows Phone 7 apps later on. We’ll also see some services that have depended on Silverlight before easily ported to the phone. Like what? Ho ho, like mother***king Netflix (which, while shown off here, won’t necessarily get a real release):

Games, as we’ve seen a bit of before, have the potential to be great, not just because of the platform’s minimum requirements (which make the iPhone’s hardware seem downright clunky) but because of the deep Xbox Live integration. Joe Belfiore showed us a quick demo, in which he actually earned Xbox Live achievement points, er, live.

• More on Netflix for Windows Phone 7
• More on Xbox Live on Windows Phone 7

The takeaway at the end of the app demos—which made up a tremendous chunk of this keynote—is that Microsoft knows how important apps are for Windows Phone 7, or more importantly, how instrumental the lack of decent apps was in the decline of Windows Mobile 6.x. They’re going all out, claiming that devs can create apps in a matter of minutes, and (so far) coddling them as much as possible. The one thing they can’t control, though, is how fast customers pick up on Windows Phone 7 Series. Without an audience, developers won’t bother to write apps; without apps, buyers won’t bother buying Windows Phone 7 Series phones. Microsoft’s new mobile strategy may be impressive, but it could find itself stuck in a Catch-22 come release time.

All the Rest

Obviously, Microsoft didn’t run through all the stuff they’d already covered back at Mobile World Congress when Windows Phone 7 was announced, so here’s the rest of the story.

• A new piece of hardware showed its face today. (Above.) This time it’s from Samsung. Externally, it’s indistinguishable from the Omnia HD. Internally, you can assume it falls inline with Microsoft’s minimum requirements for Windows Phone 7.

• Windows Phone 7 Series: Everything Is Different Now

• Windows Phone 7: First Videos

• How Will Xbox Live Work on Windows Phone 7?

• An Epic 22-Minute Walkthrough of Windows Phone 7

• Windows Phone 7 Series Hands-On Pics and Video

• Windows Phone 7 Apps: What We Know, What We Don’t

• Microsoft, Into the Light: The Unofficial Windows Phone 7 Strategy

With HTC’s upcoming crop of Androids, you’ll be able to separate people into two distinct groups: those who spring for the brainier, better-specced Desire, and those who get bowled over by the beautiful, yet lesser-specced Legend.

The Desire (or Nexus One) is the final word in the Androidsphere—it’s a mark of someone who knows what they’re doing, who wants to show people they NEED that extra computing power. If you compare it to the Legend, you could be justified in saying Legend-salivators are more shallow, ignoring the might of a Snapdragon processor in lieu of a unibody aluminum shell and slim build.

You’d be wrong, however.

I Mean, It Is Just a Sequel

The internal upgrades are minor, when you consider it next to the HTC Hero, but like the Empire Strikes Back, sometimes sequels are far better than the original. While we found the Hero “tragically flawed” in its slugginess, the Legend’s slightly more powerful 600MHz processor behaved—well, like a legend. The 3.2-inch screen has the same amount of pixels as the Hero, but swaps the HVGA for a more superior AMOLED. The 5.0-megapixel camera is still the same quality, but has the much-welcomed addition of a flash. You get the picture—the Legend is building on the Hero’s quality in incremental upgrades, but every change, however minor, radicalizes the experience of using the Legend.

It’s running Android 2.1, which as any Hero owner knows should be released as an over-the-air update soon. One day. The jump from 1.6 to 2.1 is impressive—it’s a lot faster, the multitouch is better, there’s greater integration of social networking profiles with contacts, and HTML5 support, amongst other—admittedly small—changes.

Design Works

Plain and simple—the Legend is the most well-built phone I’ve ever had in my hand. You just know when you feel the weight of it, the cool curved exterior of the unibody aluminum shell, and touch the ultra-responsive touchscreen. It’s that sensation when you first tenderly held the original iPhone, which has been long-missing in the market.

The bottom and top of the back is actually made from rubberized plastic though, so there are no issues with wireless signals—unlike the first generation of the iPhone. Removing part of the case reveals a very thin battery and a touch-sensitive catch which keeps the SIM and microSD cards encased. It’s a small point, but it’s also the most polished example of a phone’s innards that I’ve ever seen.

Just like BlackBerry, HTC is migrating its trackballs to optical trackpads. This is a relief, but in actual fact I barely had to use the trackpad—only when having to make an edit when typing out messages or emails. The screen is just so responsive, with nary a wrongly-actioned command made, that you can imagine HTC forgoing the trackpad altogether at a later date.

Only eight buttons reside on the Legend’s body. The on/off button up top, the two volume controls on the top left, and then on the lower face, home, menu, back and search. They all worked well, though the home, menu, back and search keys did feel a bit cheap in comparison to the high-end feeling of the rest of the handset.

Same Old Camera?

HTC’s used the same 5.0-megapixel camera as we saw on the Hero, but the addition of a flash is a new and exciting step for them—strange as that sounds. As you can see from the two photos below, the flash is very strong—too strong, I’d say. However, the quality is decent in lowlight conditions—noisy for sure, but I’ve seen worse.

My friends in lowlight at a cinema before Alice In Wonderland 3D

In daytime I had a lot more luck. Testing it out on some cakes in my kitchen in the late afternoon sun retained the nice rays of sun across the cakes, with the yellow of the flowers showing up bright. But even at 5MP, the general image performance isn’t enough to ditch your point and shoot just yet.

Testing indoors with daylight

More Sense Than HTC Sense

Most manufacturers are skinning Android with their own proprietary interfaces…MOTOBLUR, Mediascape, S-Class, they’re ok, but I’d almost rather use Android in its natural flavor than have to put up with some of their issues.

There just ain’t no Android phone like a HTC Sense Android phone. It’s simply the best skin an Android could ask for, even without the minor improvements seen in the Legend. By far the pick of the bunch is the new “Leap” view—or “Helicopter view” as it was known in-house when designed. It works much like Mac OS X’s Exposé function, bringing all seven homescreens up as thumbnails. The feature is very useful, particularly if you just can’t remember which screen your mail, or the weather widget, is listed on. The pinch command takes some getting used to, but once you’ve got the gesture down-pat, it’s a godsend.

Leap—or helicopter—view

But with ever feature that will be used often comes one with no point at all. FriendStream is a nice enough widget, which collates all your friends’ updates from Twitter, Facebook and Flickr into one feed, but for anyone who’s a purist and likes to see every form of update on each social networking site, it will be removed quickly from the homescreen. I preferred using HTC’s own brilliant Twitter widget, Peep, for the full Twitter options, and the Facebook app to see every form of action. The Flickr integration is handy, being able to see when my contacts upload photos, but not necessary if you get email notifications already.

Plus, FriendStream just felt slow sometimes—in fact, on a very speedy phone, it felt incongruous in comparison to everything else, often updating with tweets quite a few minutes later than the Twitter widget did. It’s not a big problem, but for someone who relies on Twitter heavily as a source of entertainment, it became a source of frustration.

FriendStream

Respectable Battery Life

The Legend ran 36 hours before it died on me. Not too bad, considering I had an hour-long call plus about five shorter ones, sent and received around 20 text messages, and spent almost a whole day browsing the web, checking Twitter, and showing it off to my friends. After the horror of seeing my G1’s battery deplete in half a day when I first bought it, the Legend’s 1300mAh battery ran to my satisfaction.

The Legend Is The Most Solid Android Phone I’ve Used

True, other phones may be better specced, but with that premium build it’s like comparing a Sony Vaio (not a bad laptop, sure) to a MacBook. Sometimes there’s just no contest. While the extra horsepower and added touches of the Nexus One and Desire are nice, I found the Legend more than satisfactory.

It wasn’t sluggish, certainly didn’t have bugs or issues like the G1 and Hero, and while it’ll inevitably slow down and have you cursing the fact you didn’t spring for something with a Snapdragon chip, I’m going to award it possibly the highest accolade a reviewer can gift a device: I’m going to upgrade to one.

It’s not the best Android phone. That badge still belongs to the Nexus One, or possibly the Desire, when we review it. But it’s one of the best all-rounders, when you consider the hardware—and the feeling you’re left with once it leaves your hand. I feel bereft without it.

Superb hardware quality

HTC Sense is better than ever

Addition of camera flash

Super-fast and responsive

FriendStream could be faster


Camera flash isn’t perfect

The HTC Legend hasn’t been announced for the US market yet, with the European launch sometime this month.

You can’t talk about the Devour, Motorola’s new slide-out QWERTY Android phone, without talking about the Droid, Motorola’s favored child. And it’s precisely when pitted against the Droid that the Devour stops making sense.

The Price

The Devour runs $150, with a two-year Verizon contract. But not really. (More on that later.)

What It’s Supposed to Be

When the Devour was announced, I called it a “Baby Droid with Motoblur.” That’s not quite right, it turns out. Despite a measurably smaller screen, the Devour is actually a bit larger than the Droid. It’s a hefty, machined aluminum slab of a device that feels sturdy in your hand and a bit fat in your pocket. It’s a continuation of the Droid’s design philosophy, if not its actual design: The Devour obviously copies some stylistic traits, but the Droid’s goldish finish and sharp edged evoke an entirely different past than the Devour’s matte silver, slightly more rounded profile. A child of the 70s speaks the Droid’s retrofuturistic design language; the Devour speaks more to a future-forward 90s sensibility. At any rate, it looks nice.

And it feels nice, too—gone is the Droid’s lifeless slider, replaced with a springy mechanism that just begs to be fiddled with. The tapered sides give you a place to rest your index fingers during typing. Speaking of which, the Devour’s keyboard, with slightly raised, perfectly rounded and neatly spaced keys, is a welcome improvement over the Droid’s. And instead of a trackball or d-pad, the Devour has a small, inset touchpad on its lower-left chin. So far, so good.

Then you turn it on.

This is when it becomes clear what the Devour is meant to be, which, despite the apparent improvements, is something less than a Droid. The smaller screen—3.1 inches to the Droid’s 3.7—pushes fewer pixels, too, at just 320×480 vs 854×480. The camera, which shoots 3MP photos, suffers from poor color and clarity issues to a greater extent than the already mediocre sensor of its predecessor.

And the software! Oh, the software. Here’s how Jason summed up the Motoblur widget philosophy in his original Cliq review:

The four widgets of note are the status widget, the messaging widget, the happenings widget and the news/RSS widget. The news widget is self-explanatory, and really cool that a phone would have a built-in RSS reader right on the home screen, but the others are a little bit trickier. The status widget lets you update your “status” to any of your social networking sites, like Facebook or Twitter. The messages widget consolidates ALL your 1:1 messaging, like emails, SMS, DMs on Twitter or private messages on Facebook. The happenings is a feed of other people’s status updates on your social networks.

Motoblur is as good here as it’s ever been, aided by plenty of tweaks, faster hardware, and a more developed underlying operating system. (This is the first time we’ve seen it laid atop of Android 1.6; the Cliq was a 1.5 handset.) But as Motoblur has inched forward, Android has outpaced it. And unfortunately its stablemate, the Droid, is one of the best exemplars of why you don’t need to mess with Android.


What was so refreshing about the Droid was that its software was essentially untouched—Android 2.0, which was at the time the newest build of the OS, had been left alone to represent Google vision for Android, without interference from Motorola or Verizon. And because Android 2.0 was so good, it took the wind out of the sails of alternative Android interfaces like HTC’s Sense or Motoblur.

Motoblur’s greatest sin isn’t that it can be a bit confusing to navigate at first, or that it feels a bit crowded on a 3.1-inch screen, or that its inbuilt Twitter and Facebook functionality depends too much on sending you to an external browser; it’s that in pursuit of a custom interface and minor, proprietary features—Flash Lite in the browser, DLNA media sharing and proprietary voice command and nav software to compete with Google’s native solutions—Motorola has left Devour users with an out-of-date version of Android. Android is an OS that’s fragmented, and 1.6 is one of the fragments that’s getting left behind. Even some Google apps won’t work on Android 1.6, like Goggles or Google Earth. (Update: Goggles apparently works on 1.6, but I can’t find it in the Android Market on the Devour. Ideas?) Of course, an upgrade is possible, but a Blur-adorned Android will always lag a version or three behind vanilla Android, which seems to be assimilating many of its most important features anyway.

The redeeming factor here should be that it’s cheaper than the Droid by about $50, positioned to appeal to people who might otherwise buy a messaging phone, but who don’t want to put down for a Droid. But even at launch, this price positioning doesn’t work.

What It Really Is

if you’re a Verizon customer, holding this next to a messaging feature phone, the choice is pretty clear: go with the smartphone.Thing is, that’s a false dilemma. You have other options.

Before the Devour hits shelves later this week, it will have been undermined by one of its biggest sellers. Best Buy, at launch, will be selling it for $100, alongside the Droid, also priced at $100. The $150/$200 Devour/Droid distinction will remain intact at Verizon stores, but you can probably depend on these lower prices to be an option from here on out.

What you’re getting with the Devour, then, is a downgraded Droid. Sure, the keyboard is a bit better, and the styling may appeal to some people alienated by the Droid’s aggressive lines, but if you’re a Verizon customer, holding these two potential purchases in your hands—which, by the way, have access to the exact same smartphone plans—it’s hard to imagine why you’d opt for the silver one. [Motorola]

Elegant, brushed aluminum design


Better keyboard and slider than the Droid; generally better hardware than the Cliq


Motoblur works reasonably well for social networking hounds, but later versions of Android with dedicated social apps serve just as well


Same street price as the Droid, which is just a better phone.


It’s stuck on Android 1.6, rendering it incompatible with some newer apps—even apps from Google

Windows Phone Series 7 is here, and it’s like nothing we’ve seen from Microsoft—or anyone else—before. But how does it measure up? And where does every other smartphone OS stand?

If you want to skip the gallery format, click here.

iPhone OS 3.x

The third major release of the iPhone’s software, and the second since the platform got its App Store, iPhone OS 3.x has succeeded on the strength of simplicity, intuitiveness and a tremendous selection of applications. It serves as the basis for the OS that will ship with the new Apple iPad.

Available: June 2009
Open Source/Free: No
Multiple Handset Manufacturers: No
Multitasking: No
Multitouch Interface: Yes
Browser/Engine: Safari/WebKit
Video Recording: Yes
Upgrades: Sync/Patcher
Syncing Software: Yes
App Store Size: 100k+
App Sideloading: No
Jailbreaking/rooting: Yes
Flash Support: No

Android 2.x

In just over a year, Google’s Linux-based Android OS has gone from a rough-edged software experiment to a smartphone powerhouse, running atop some of the most powerful hardware available. Version 2.1 is the software platform for Google’s own first phone, the Nexus One. Android phones vary in both hardware configurations and software versions, but are generally increasing in popularity.

Available: October ’09
Open Source/Free: Yes/Yes
Multiple Handset Manufacturers: Yes
Multitasking: Yes
Multitouch Interface: Yes
Browser/Engine: Chrome/WebKit
Video Recording: Yes
Upgrades: Over the Air
Syncing Software: No
App Store Size: 20k+
App Sideloading: Yes
Jailbreaking/rooting: Yes
Flash Support: Within six months

Palm webOS 1.x

Palm’s webOS represented a complete reboot for the company, whose aging Palm OS found itself outpaced by more modern, finger-friendly offerings from Apple and Google. At the core of the OS is a novel multitasking system, with which users can cycles through apps, or “cards.” Another webOS selling point is the deep integration of social networking directly into the OS, and an emphasis on messaging.

Available: June ’09
Open Source/Free: No/No
Multiple Handset Manufacturers: No
Multitasking: Yes
Multitouch Interface: Yes
Browser/Engine: webOS/WebKit
Video Recording: Coming soon
Upgrades: Over the Air
Syncing Software: No
App Store Size: 1400+
App Sideloading: No
Jailbreaking/rooting: Yes
Flash Support: Within six months

BlackBerry OS 5

RIM is known for issuing frequent updates for its mobile OSes, but they are minimal, and at heart, BlackBerry OS 5 is deeply similar to its early, decade-old predecessors. BlackBerry OS is inclined towards messaging—its inboxes feature prominently—with web browsing and apps as secondary focuses. RIM’s recent success with the consumer (as opposed to enterprise) market shows they’ve taken pains to improve the usability and aesthetics of the OS, though its corporate roots still show through.

Available: November ’09
Open Source/Free: No/No
Multiple Handset Manufacturers: No
Multitasking: Yes
Multitouch Interface: No
Browser/Engine: BlackBerry/Proprietary (WebKit forthcoming)
Video Recording: Yes
Upgrades: Sync/patcher/over the air
Syncing Software: Yes
App Store Size: 3k+
App Sideloading: Yes
Jailbreaking/rooting: No
Flash Support: Within six months

Windows Mobile 6.5.x

Windows Mobile 6.5 is the last predecessor to Windows Phone 7 Series, and it will coexist with WP7 for the foreseeable future, as a bridge for corporate customers. Its basic design and codebase harks back to the early 2000s, and while it featured multitasking, copy and paste and a significant number of 3rd party apps well before the iPhone or Android did, WinMo failed to keep up with its competitors. Even with version 6.5, which added new, finger-friendly interface elements and an app marketplace, success was not to be. Despite its successor’s seemingly related name, this is the end of the road for the WinMo OS.

Available: October ’09
Open Source/Free: No/Licensed
Multiple Handset Manufacturers: Yes
Multitasking: Yes
Multitouch Interface: No
Browser/Engine: Internet Explorer/Trident
Video Recording: Yes
Upgrades: Sync/Patcher
Syncing Software: Yes
App Store Size: Under 500 1000+, depending on handset
App Sideloading: Yes
Jailbreaking/rooting: No
Flash Support: Yes

Windows Phone 7 Series

Windows Phone 7 Series is a total revamping of Microsoft’s mobile strategy, drawing more on design philosophy of the Zune HD than of Windows Mobile. The interface is designed primarily for touch input, and eschews icon grids and menus for a series of paneled hubs. The unreleased OS features deep integration with Xbox and Zune services, as well as a completely new app store.

Available: Holiday ’10
Open Source/Free: No/No
Multiple Handset Manufacturers: Yes
Multitasking: No, probably! (With possible exceptions.)
Multitouch Interface: Yes
Browser/Engine: Internet Explorer/Trident
Video Recording: Yes
Upgrades: TBD
Syncing Software: Media
App Store Size: TBD
App Sideloading: TBD (Unlikely)
Jailbreaking/rooting: TBD
Flash Support: TBD (Probable)