Hasta La Gadget!

Courting the largest carrier in the United States is probably at the top of any phone manufacturer’s to-do list, and it’s starting to sound like Nokia — on the strength of its just-announced Windows Phone gamble — has an uphill battle ahead of it. Verizon CTO Tony Melone has gone on record out at Mobile World Congress this week saying that he’s skeptical Micosoft has the capability to meet its lofty volume goals for Windows Phone — a little odd, considering that Verizon is on the verge of launching its first Windows Phone 7 model — and that he doesn’t think “Verizon needs the Nokia and Microsoft relationship.” Referring seemingly directly to Nokia CEO Stephen Elop’s desire to make the smartphone war a “three-horse race” between Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, Melone says he thinks that “right now the three OS players we see for our network are Android, Apple, and RIM.” Of course, just like the iPhone, we’re sure Melone’s attitude could change in a snap if Windows Phone picks up enough steam — but even in the best case, that’s going to take a while.

Verizon CTO: we don’t ‘need’ the Nokia-Microsoft partnership; Android, iOS, and BlackBerry are the big three platforms originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Feb 2011 13:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s a nugget to chew on as you roll out of bed this morning. During “The Power of Applications” keynote today at Mobile World Congress, HTC CEO Peter Chou was just asked what his take was on the Microsoft / Nokia partnership. Of course, we’ve heard before that the company loves Android and WP7 equally, and it was certainly onboard from the get-to with the launch of the 7 Mozart, but it’s not often that one handset manufacturer comments on another. Contrary to popular belief, Peter seemed fairly positive on the deal, though he made sure to focus more on the software side rather than touching on Elop’s decision making skills. Here’s the quote in full:

“They’re doing what they have to do. It won’t be easy, but they’re doing what they have to do. We are very committed to Windows Mobile, and we are one of their lead partners for Windows Phone 7. So we are positive, because this combination will surely make that ecosystem stronger. As a strong player [in this ecosystem], HTC will be a beneficiary from [their decision].”

In other words, HTC’s pumped that WP7 now has more backing, which will in turn (hopefully) make its own Windows Phone 7 devices more marketable, attractive and desirable as the ecosystem grows stronger. Talk about looking on the bright side of things.

HTC CEO Peter Chou on Microsoft / Nokia partnership: ‘it’ll make the ecosystem stronger’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Feb 2011 07:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BARCELONA — Microsoft is prepping a major update for Windows Phone 7, bringing multitasking and a mobile version of Internet Explorer 9 to the mobile operating system.

The update, vaguely scheduled for “later this year,” was demoed today by Joe Belfiore, Microsoft’s vice president of Windows Phone.

The biggest new feature is multitasking. Like iOS and webOS, it manifests itself as fast-app-switching. Press the “back” button flip to the last-used app, or press and hold to enter a switching screen. This is a lot like the webOS “card” metaphor crossed with Apple’s cover flow: you flip through shrunken screenshots to get to the app you want. It’s neat and, in the beta build I tried out, fast.

When you re-enter an app, it resumes instantly. The demo showed Belfiore flipping between a couple of games, and entering right where he left off. This feature is open to third-party developers.

Another feature will be familiar to iOS 4 users: Background audio. Just like with iOS, you will now be able to run any audio app as you juggle different activities between apps.

Office for the phone is pretty self-explanatory, but more interesting is the inclusion of Microsoft’s cloud-storage service, SkyDrive (above). Users will get 25GB of online storage that is deeply tied into both Windows on the PC and the phone. It is shameful that Apple doesn’t offer the same already.

And then there’s IE9. Current Windows Phone 7 handsets ship with a mobile version of the four-year-old IE7, and IE9 is the latest version of Microsoft’s browser. IE9 for Windows Phone 7 uses the same rendering engine as desktop IE9, so sites will look as good (or bad) in both places.

Better news is hardware acceleration for graphics and video. This hands-off processor-intensive work to the GPU, or graphics processor. This speeds up the performance to a quite remarkable degree.

The skeptical might say that the demo animation, which shows many, many fish swimming on screen, shows typical Microsoft thinking: throw better hardware at poor software to make it run fast enough. But in this case, the Windows Phone team has it right: squeezing extra work from the GPU helps performance and battery life.

Microsoft has already set a fairly high GPU specification in its minimum hardware specs to take care of its Xbox Live integration. This means even current phones can benefit from the update.

This update is a solid one, and shows that the Windows Phone team is doing what Apple and Google are already doing: quick, small iterations in the OS to bring rapid improvements, instead of the monolithic juggernaut approach of desktop Windows.  It looks pretty good. Hopefully — with the help of Nokia — maybe people will actually start to buy the phones.

Photos: Charlie Sorrel/Wired.com

Want to know how the eventual, inevitable implementation of app multitasking on Windows Phone 7 will look? Wonder no longer: it’s cards, which seems to be the way a lot of guys are going after webOS showed how to do it right a couple years back, and it looks hot. To see this in action on WP7, simply hold the back button and you’ll get a card-like view of all running apps. Pick your app and you’re back where you left off in that one. You can multitask even in games, have Slacker playing in the background, and if you press a volume button while on the home screen you’ll get a quickie interface for changing track, pausing, and playing.

Microsoft indicated it didn’t previously allow for third-party multitasking due to battery life concerns, but those concerns have been mitigated — somehow. We’re not sure of the API-level details that’s letting all this magic happen, but we’ll look for those later. All we know right know is that it looks great and we can’t wait to try it out for ourselves.

Windows Phone 7’s multitasking uses zoomed-out cards to check on your apps originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Feb 2011 10:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Though he wouldn’t give an exact date, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer whittled down the availability window for the company’s first big update to Windows Phone 7 at his keynote address to the crowds gathered at Mobile World Congress today. The latest message is that it’ll be available in “early March,” which puts us precious few weeks away — more or less on track with what we’d been anticipating — bringing support for CDMA radios, copy and paste, and performance improvements. Hopefully that clears the way for the 7 Pro on Sprint, eh?

Windows Phone 7 update with copy and paste, CDMA support coming in ‘early March’ originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Feb 2011 10:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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