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Continue reading Motorola MOTOROI hands-on with video

Motorola MOTOROI hands-on with video originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading Toshiba TG02 hands-on

Toshiba TG02 hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The awkward name might be pure old-school Microsoft, but the new Windows Phone 7 Series is more Xbox and Zune than Windows Mobile 6.5. The design team was proportionally one of the biggest for any Microsoft product, and it shows.

The handset I tried is a no-name developer tool, a plain plastic box in which the camera doesn’t line up with the hole in the case, and the capacitive touchscreen doesn’t even meet Microsoft’s own minimum hardware specs for a Windows Phone 7 Series mobile phone. But despite this, the OS itself seems both polished and simple. The UI is very flat, almost all simple, sharp squares and plain text. In fact, it feels like you are looking at the large-print accessibility version.

But despite this simplicity it’s a lot of fun to use. The “hubs” into which content is organized by type are an intuitive way to work, but most of what you do every day can be done without leaving the home screen. IPhone users who live in three or four apps and constantly switch between them for updates from Twitter, e-mail and RSS will be jealous of the dynamic front page. Choose what apps, people, podcasts or almost anything you want on the main screen and they update in real time, with new information swimming sweetly onto the icons. It’s almost like a moving photo in Harry Potter, only less hokey and far more useful.

The phone I tested felt sparse, mostly due to a lack of content, but there was enough on show to appreciate how the hubs work. Hit up a contact in the People hub and you have everything relevant, from their contact details (tap to call) to their Facebook or Twitter status. It’s surprisingly natural.

This is an early iteration, and I couldn’t get any more news from Microsoft about future software. It seems, though, that this hub framework will be the way any other apps will fit into the ecosystem. Hardware, too, will change, and Steve Ballmer mentioned that the software will come on all shapes and sizes of handset.

What surprised me most was that I was expecting yet another iPhone clone. And while the Windows Phone 7 Series isn’t the huge game changer that the iPhone was upon its debut, it is different enough to embarrass pretty much everyone else except Apple.

See Also:

• Windows Phone 7 Series
• Microsoft Blends Zune Media, Xbox Live Into New Phone OS

Cellphone carriers worldwide are apparently sick of Apple’s iPhone App Store hogging all the attention and loot in the mobile software market. Two dozen of them are teaming up to open a cross-platform app store.

Carriers on board include Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, China Unicom, China Mobile, Softbank and Vodafone, among several others. The group has also partnered with three manufacturers — Samsung, LG, and Sony Ericsson — to support the initiative.

Announced at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona, Spain, the alliance’s goal is to create a “Wholesale Applications Community,” offering an open ecosystem that will enable developers to create one app for one store that’s accessible on a broad range of phones. Combined, the carriers serve 3 billion customers to date, which could be the potential audience for the wholesale app store.

The move, then, would free developers and consumers from vertical business models like Apple’s App Store. The App Store is exclusive for iPhone customers. Develop an app for the iPhone OS and it only works on iPhone OS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch and the upcoming iPad). Likewise, if you buy iPhone apps, you lose those apps if you switch to a non-Apple phone.

“The GSMA is fully supportive the Wholesale Applications Community, which will build a new, open ecosystem to spur the creation of applications that can be used regardless of device, operating system or operator,” said Rob Conway, CEO and Member of the GSMA board. “This is tremendously exciting news for our industry and will serve to catalyse the development of a range of innovative cross-device, cross-operator applications.”

As promising and beneficial as a wholesale app store sounds, it would be naive to expect it to arrive anytime soon. Cross-platform mobile operating systems, like Windows Mobile, already suffer from the issue of fragmentation: You can’t develop a single app for every Windows Mobile phone, because they vary in features such as screen size, buttons and more. The Wholesale Applications Community’s goal is to create an app store working on an even broader range of devices, and fragmentation will be an even more severe challenge to overcome.

The Wholesale Application Community also appears to be ignoring the fact that vertical integration was a key strategy that drove the App Store’s success. iPhone developers code apps that work only on iPhone OS devices, and thus they’re able to hone the quality and optimize the performance of their apps. In turn, because developers only have to code one type of app that reaches out to a large audience of iPhone OS users (about 75 million to date), many of them believe they have a better chance to make money this way. Vertical integration appears to be succeeding so far: The App Store has served 3 billion downloads and claimed 99.4 percent of the mobile-software market.

The Wholesale Application Community is aware that it would take a long time to achieve its goal.

“Ultimately, we will collectively work with the [World Wide Web Consortium] for a common standard based on our converged solution to truly ensure developers can create applications that port across mobile device platforms, and in the future between fixed and mobile devices,” the Wholesale Application Community said in a press release.

See Also:

• For the iPhone’s App Store, Quantity Really Does Matter
• Google Says Mobile App Stores Have No Future
• Rejected By Apple, iPhone Developers Go Underground

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)…

Continue reading Windows Phone 7 Series hands-on and impressions (updated with video)

Windows Phone 7 Series hands-on and impressions (updated with video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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