Not quite sure if you’ve heard, but Microsoft launched a new mobile operating system today. Crazy, right? Unfortunately, it’ll be a few weeks seasons still before you can actually wrap your palms around an actual Windows Phone 7 Series device, but the folks over at MSDN aren’t holding back. They’ve hosted up a 22 minute video walkthrough to explain every nook and crannie of the fresh OS, and if you’re one of those “impatient” types, you owe it to yourself to hit the source link and mash play. Grab a beverage first, though.
Forget everything you know about Windows Mobile. Seriously, throw the whole OS concept in a garbage bin or incinerator or something. Microsoft has done what would have been unthinkable for the company just a few years ago: started from scratch. At least, that’s how things look (and feel) with Windows Phone 7 Series. This really is a completely new OS — and not just Microsoft’s new OS, it’s a new smartphone OS, like webOS new, like iPhone OS new. You haven’t used an interface like this before (well, okay, if you’ve used a Zune HD then you’ve kind of used an interface like this). Still, 7 Series goes wider and deeper than the Zune by a longshot, and it’s got some pretty intense ideas about how you’re supposed to be interacting with a mobile device. We had a chance to go hands-on with the dev phone before today’s announcement, and hear from some of the people behind the devices, and here’s our takeaway. (And don’t worry, we’ve got loads of pictures and video coming, so keep checking this post for the freshest updates).
First the look and feel. The phones are really secondary here, and we want to focus on the interface. The design and layout of 7 Series’ UI (internally called Metro) is really quite original, utilizing what one of the designers (Albert Shum, formerly of Nike) calls an “authentically digital” and “chromeless” experience. What does that mean? Well we can tell you what it doesn’t mean — no shaded icons, no faux 3D or drop shadows, no busy backgrounds (no backgrounds at all), and very little visual flair besides clean typography and transition animations. The whole look is strangely reminiscent of a terminal display (maybe Microsoft is recalling its DOS roots here) — almost Tron-like in its primary color simplicity. To us, it’s rather exciting. This OS looks nothing like anything else on the market, and we think that’s to its advantage. Admittedly, we could stand for a little more information available within single views, and we have yet to see how the phone will handle things like notifications, but the design of the interface is definitely in a class of its own. Here’s a few takeaways on what it’s like to use (and some video)…
Apple may have the iPhone, but the iPhone doesn’t have the Xbox. Today, Microsoft leveraged their most compelling entertainment asset, the Xbox 360, into Windows Phone 7 Series. But what does this mean, practically speaking?
(Note: If you don’t understand what the heck Windows Phone 7 is, read this first.)
Here’s the official word from Microsoft on how WP7 will incorporate Xbox Live.
“Games—This hub delivers the first and only official Xbox LIVE experience on a phone, including Xbox LIVE games, Spotlight feed and the ability to see a gamer’s avatar, Achievements and gamer profile. With more than 23 million active members around the world, Xbox LIVE unlocks a world of friends, games and entertainment on Xbox 360, and now also on Windows Phone 7 Series.”
What we saw in Microsoft’s demo today fleshes that concept out a bit. There will be a Spotlight section, with your Xbox Live avatar and notice of friends’ achievements. And of course, there will be games—”premium titles” with achievements and multiplayer connected to other cellphones, PCs and Xbox 360 consoles.
Don’t let the simple interface fool you. Xbox Live on a phone is more than having your avatar on one more screen because of the three types of games I believe we’ll see on Windows Phone 7.
The Three Games of Windows 7 Phone
The first type of game will be a lot like an iPhone title. Powerful pocket hardware will push impressive graphics (that make the PSP and DS look sad). That’s a simple idea that I know all of you can wrap your heads around.
Now, some of these games may be released cross-platform, as Microsoft teased today. They’ll be what I classify as the second type of gaming on Windows Phone 7—casual, connected titles that allow anyone with a Live account to join in (no matter if they’re on a WP7, 360 or PC). You won’t see the most beautiful XBLA titles on the phone, of course, but something like Worms? Why not? A buy it once, play it anywhere model would make this type of game incredibly enticing. UPDATE: It appears that Windows Phone 7 will run XNA framework, meaning it should be (theoretically) compatible with the Xbox 360’s XNA games.
The third type of game—the one that will appeal most to the hardcore gamers—is the Xbox 360 expanded title, something unmentioned by Microsoft but that I see coming a mile away. Imagine a minigame accompaniment to Halo that could unlock more content/resources/anything. Now imagine that such a game is driven by some of the most powerful handheld processors in the world. (You should be picturing something that looks a lot like Call of Duty’s Nazi Zombies on the iPhone.) But with the iPhone, Nazi Zombies never leaves your phone—nothing about it will affect your Call of Duty experience on your home console.
Such no longer needs to be the case when the game is connected to Live. AAA franchises can make their way to the mobile space with Microsoft in a way that they never could with Apple. Put differently, pocketable games can have console-level repercussions.
Microsoft’s Mobile Trump Card: Nobody Else Has an Xbox Live…Not Really
While the iPhone is a treasure trove of pocketable amusements, they’re pretty much self-contained entities working in a closed box. Sadly, pretty much the same thing can be said about the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. Nintendo and Sony have both experimented with connecting their mobile and home platforms on a title-by-title basis (and no doubt, the PSP’s early promise of Remote Play still sounds like a revolutionary idea today), but neither company has been all that successful in bridging the gap to create a seamless digital experience.
Plus, let’s face it, neither Sony nor Nintendo is relevant in the smartphone business—the present and future of pocket gaming. And while the iPhone is tough competition, it’s one phone. Windows Phone 7 Series is a specification (that includes baseline hardware specs and software specs) for many phones that could potentially be on many carriers.
Imagine if Nintendo let any willing manufacturer integrate Wii/DS services. That’s essentially what Microsoft is doing here.
But when it really comes down to it, is Microsoft selling us the Xbox 360 experience on cellphones, or are they pitching putting cellphone games on the Xbox 360? And will anyone want to create original, non-ported content for the Windows 7 Phone Series when there are 75 million iPhones and iPod touches out there already?
Time will tell. Despite what promises to be the most full-featured mobile gaming platform of all time, Microsoft must woo developers to create compelling mobile content before any of this matters.
As we see in this first ever video, the Windows Phone 7 interface is filled with simple, beautiful animations not so dissimilar to the Zune HD. UPDATE:
UPDATE: Here’s more video showing us the experience of maps and web browsing. Very sharp.
UPDATE 2: And here’s a full features rundown clip that’s a must-watch.
UPDATE 3: One last video from Recombu—here we see a giant Windows 7 Series mockup running the interface in real time. It probably offers the best feel of general navigation we’ve seen yet.
Update: Read our hands-on with the new Windows Phone 7 Series.
Microsoft on Monday announced its next-generation mobile operating system Windows Phone 7 Series, which will bring together the Zune multimedia experience and Xbox Live gaming to mobile phones worldwide.
Manufacturers have already begun building phones featuring Windows Phone 7 Series with plans for release by the 2010 holiday season, according to Microsoft. Manufacturers on board include Dell, Garmin, Asus, HTC, Hewlett-Packard, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba.
Carrier partners include AT&T, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange, SFR, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telstra, and Vodafone.
Microsoft did not announce its own phone hardware. However, the software giant is working more closely than it has in the past with manufacturing partners in the design process of their phone hardware. For example, each Windows 7 Series phone will include a dedicated hardware button to access Microsoft’s Bing search tool with one click.
“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,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft, in a press statement. “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.”
Similar to the Zune HD’s interface, the Windows Phone 7 Series main screen is organized into six “Hubs” (categories) containing different sets of features: People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace and Office.
The People hub includes tools to make posting status updates, photos and videos on social networking sites (such as Facebook and Windows Live) a one-step process.
The Pictures hub keeps a user’s videos and photos all in one place, where they can also be immediately posted on a social networking site.
The Games section will provide access to the Xbox Live experience. With Xbox Live integration, Windows Phone 7 Series users will be able to download and play games sold through Microsoft’s online store, Xbox Live Marketplace, which currently serves about 300 titles. Windows Phone 7 users will also be able to view their Xbox Live profiles, avatars and game achievements on their phones. (The addition of Xbox Live to Microsoft’s mobile OS may come as a surprise, but the software giant as early as 2007 announced its plans to incorporate the Xbox Live experience into phones as part of its “Live Anywhere” program.)
For Music + Video, Microsoft is integrating its Zune player software into Windows Phone 7 Series, which will enable Windows Phone 7 Series customers to sync and play content downloaded through the Zune Marketplace store. Windows Phone 7 Series devices will also include a built-in FM radio and Zune Social to share their music recommendations with other users.
The Office hub will contain productivity tools: Office, OneNote and SharePoint Workspace, enabling users to read, edit and share documents. This section also includes Outlook Mobile for managing e-mail, appointments, contacts and tasks.
At the press conference, Ballmer was vague about the Marketplace hub, which will serve downloadable third-party apps and games. Microsoft did not disclose whether Windows Phone 7 Series would have access to apps and games sold through the Zune Marketplace. The company said it plans to share details about the Windows Phone 7 Series Marketplace and its development platform during the Microsoft MIX developer conference in March.
“Windows phones are very differentiated with the new UI,” said Michael Gartenberg, vice president and tech strategist of Interpet. “They don’t look to act like another iPhone clone. The integration of other Microsoft services such as Zune and especially Xbox will help drive a message that there’s more to mobile than apps, and that integrative services matter a lot as well. Finally, the breakdown of app silos into an integrated story will help, and Microsoft explains why different can be better.”
Microsoft’s new, rebranded mobile OS is the software giant’s effort to regain its edge in the mobile space. The software giant had a head start in mobile beginning with Windows CE, its pocket PC OS, in 1996, which serves as the foundation for the Windows Mobile OS shipping on smartphones today. However, while Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android devices are gaining market share and rising in popularity, they’ve left Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS in the dust. Windows Mobile lost nearly a third of its smartphone market share between 2008 and 2009, according to research firm Gartner. Windows Mobile had 11 percent of the global smartphone market in the third quarter of 2008, according to Gartner, and in the third quarter of 2009 Windows Mobile’s market share plummeted to 7.9 percent.
Analysts and developers told Wired.com in November 2009 that Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS failed to appeal to the mainstream because its apps focused on enterprise users rather than consumers. Also, from a programmer’s perspective the platform was difficult to develop apps for due to segmentation of the hardware ecosystem for Windows Mobile smartphones. Because Windows Mobile ships on several different manufacturers’ hardware, including phones made by HTC, LG and Samsung, developers have to code an app for several phones with different UI styles, buttons and screen sizes — a daunting task when compared to coding one app for Apple’s iPhone platform.
It remains to be seen to what extent Windows Phone 7 Series will compensate for its predecessor’s weaknesses — though the emphasis of personal media and social networking, along with the additions of Xbox gaming and Zune functionality, will likely shift the new platform’s focus toward consumers. Also, because Microsoft is now more involved in the design process of Windows Phone 7 Series hardware (as shown by the Bing button and built-in FM tuner included with all Windows Phone 7 Series phones), it may become easier for developers to code software for the new platform.
“Microsoft hasn’t been in nearly as bad shape as many have believed, but this refresh takes them to the next level in terms of mobile platforms and does so in a way that differentiates them from the rest of the market,” Gartenberg said. “Their challenge now is to execute, continue to tell the rest of the story and begin to expand their market share as these devices come to market.”
A live webcast of the Windows Phone 7 Series announcement will be viewable at Microsoft’s website 3 p.m. CET (6 a.m. PDT) on Monday. Wired.com’s Charlie Sorrel will be reporting live from Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, Spain. He’ll post more details as he receives them, so stay tuned.
Windows Phone 7 Series. Get used to the name, because it’s now a part of the smartphone vernacular… however verbose it may seem. Today Microsoft launches one of its most ambitious (if not most ambitious) projects: the rebranding of Windows Mobile. The company is introducing the new mobile OS at Mobile World Congress 2010, in Barcelona, and if the press is anything to be believed, this is just the beginning. The phone operating system does away with pretty much every scrap of previous mobile efforts from Microsoft, from the look and feel down to the underlying code — everything is brand new. 7 Series has rebuilt Windows Mobile from the ground up, featuring a completely altered home screen and user interface experience, robust Xbox LIVE and Zune integration, and vastly new and improved social networking tools. Gone is the familiar Start screen, now replaced with “tiles” which scroll vertically and can be customized as quick launches, links to contacts, or self contained widgets. The look of the OS has also been radically upended, mirroring the Zune HD experience closely, replete with that large, iconic text for menus, and content transitions which elegantly (and dimensionally) slide a user into and out of different views. The OS is also heavily focused on social networking, providing integrated contact pages which show status updates from multiple services and allow fast jumps to richer cloud content (such as photo galleries). The Xbox integration will include LIVE games, avatars, and profiles, while the Zune end of things appears to be a carbon copy of the standalone device’s features (including FM radio).
Besides just flipping the script on the brand, the company seems to be taking a much more vertical approach with hardware and user experience, dictating rigid specs for 7 Series devices (a specific CPU and speed, screen aspect ratio and resolution, memory, and even button configuration), and doing away with carrier or partner UI customizations such as Sense or TouchWiz. That’s right — there will be a single Windows Phone identity regardless of carrier or device brand. Those new phones will likely look similar at first, featuring a high res touchscreen, three front-facing buttons (back, start, and perhaps not shockingly, a Bing key), and little else.
Carrier partnerships are far and wide, including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange, SFR, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telstra, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone, while hardware partners include Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC, HP, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Qualcomm. We’re told that we likely won’t get to see any third-party devices at MWC, though Microsoft is showing off dev units of unknown origin, and the first handsets are supposed to hit the market by the holidays of this year.
We had chance to go hands-on with a device before the announcement, and we’ve got some detail to share on just what the experience is like, so click here to read our hands-on impressions (with lots of pics and video on the way!).
It’s astounding that until this moment, three years after the iPhone, the biggest software company in the world basically didn’t compete in mobile. Windows Phone 7 Series is more than the Microsoft smartphone we’ve been waiting for. Everything’s different now. More »
It looks like the next generation of little green robots just got a little bit faster, with Comsys Mobile announcing its ComMAX CM1125 reference design at Mobile World Congress 2010 (and beating HTC to the punch). It’ll apparently find life inside Windows Mobile handsets as well, where it will not only offer WiMAX, but bring GSM/Edge, WLAN, GPS, Bluetooth, and even FM radio to the table, all in a design with “exceptionally low power operation.” It’s said to be able to switch from WiMAX to Edge seamlessly, though we image that transition would feel something like being inside KITT on Turbo Boost and hitting the Emergency Braking System. No word on when we’ll see phones at retail based on this design, but we’ll endeavor to bring you more information on this design (as well as more Knight Rider references) as the show progresses.
Behold! Windows Phone 7. Someone wasn’t quite careful enough with his last minute update of this MWC signage and a passerby managed to snap this first glimpse of the WP7 interface, featuring bold, rectangular icons and Xbox integration.
This shot seems to confirm, to some extent, the bit of the last significant batch of rumors that promised tight Xbox integration. It also shows off the simplistic, geometric start page, including big, square icons for phone calls, messages, Twitter, and Facebook and a large band for accessing your pictures.
The device in the shot is a simple one: the screen is surrounded by a black bezel with a thin metal trim. Three hardware (or maybe touch?) buttons below the screen are the only visible controls, with a backwards arrow, a home-button with the Windows icon, and something that looks like a sideways magnifying glass. Is this the Zune phone? Or just another device in the WP7 stable? [Engadget]
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Apple may have the iPhone, but the iPhone doesn’t have the Xbox. Today, Microsoft leveraged their most compelling entertainment asset, the 
What we saw in Microsoft’s demo today fleshes that concept out a bit. There will be a Spotlight section, with your Xbox Live avatar and notice of friends’ achievements. And of course, there will be games—”premium titles” with achievements and multiplayer connected to other cellphones, PCs and Xbox 360 consoles.
UPDATE 2: And here’s a full features rundown clip that’s a must-watch.
UPDATE 3: One last video from 
