Windows Phone 7 is now available on three handsets: the HTC HD7, the HTC Surround and the Samsung Focus (pictured above). The HDC7 is available for T-Mobile customers, and the Surround and Focus are available for AT&T customers.
The phones are listed at $200 retail, but some web discounts bring them down to as low as $150 with a new contract.
Two other Windows Phone 7 handsets — Dell’s Venue Pro and the LG Quantum — are scheduled to ship during the holiday season, according to Microsoft.
All the phones include a Snapdragon processor, 256 MB of RAM, at least 4 GB of flash storage, 802.11 b/g wireless, a capacitive touchscreen and five sensors (A-GPS, accelerometer, compass, proximity and light).
Full specifications for the five Windows Phone 7 handsets are available at Microsoft’s website.
Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft’s complete do-over on a mobile OS after scrapping Windows Mobile in late 2008. For more details on what happened behind the scenes, see our feature “How Microsoft hit CTRL+ALT+DEL on Windows Phone.”
Corporate vice president and director of Windows Phone Program Management, Joe Belfiore, holds his prototype Samsung device running Windows Phone 7 on campus at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. Photo: Mike Kane/Wired.com
Microsoft staff refer to December 2008 as “The Reset” — the month that the company killed all progress on its Windows phone project and started over.
It’s a measure of how deep a hole Microsoft had dug itself into that the employees interviewed by Wired.com were unanimous in calling this a good thing. Even though the software titan had a head start on phone software beginning with Windows CE back in 1996, the subsequent Windows Mobile OS suffered from steep declines in market share when pitted against more user-friendly phones, like the iPhone and the Android-powered Droid.
“It was trying to put too much functionality in front of the user at one time,” said Bill Flora, a design director at Microsoft, reflecting on Windows Mobile’s mistakes. “It resulted in an experience that was a little cluttered and overwhelming for a lot of people today. It felt ‘computery.’”
An un-sexy OS didn’t bode well for Microsoft. The outdated design of Windows Mobile contributed to a stereotype that Microsoft cared little about customers and was focused only on big sales to big companies. It symbolized a software leader losing its edge.
Furthermore, Windows Mobile’s shrinkage in the market was embarrassing for a company whose CEO Steve Ballmer previously laughed at Apple’s iPhone for its lack of a keyboard and high price tag, only to admit three years later that Microsoft had fallen far behind.
“We were ahead of this game and now we find ourselves No. 5 in the market,” Ballmer said at an All Things Digital Conference. “We missed a whole cycle.”
Recognizing it needed to play serious catchup, Microsoft essentially hit CTRL+ALT+DEL on Windows Mobile, rebooting its mobile OS like a balky, old Windows PC and making a fresh start.
The company spent six weeks hatching a plan for a Windows phone do-over, and it set a deadline of one year to build and ship a brand new OS.
The end result was Windows Phone 7, an operating system with a tiled-based user interface that looks nothing like its predecessor. The first Windows Phone 7 handsets will hit stores today in the United States.
The reset was no simple task: It involved bringing in new managers, reorganizing the Windows phone-design department and opening new test facilities dedicated to mobile hardware.
Here’s how the company did it.
Corporate vice president and director of Windows Phone Program Management, Joe Belfiore, listens to Don Coyner, General Manager of US Shared Studios as he discusses Windows Phone 7. Photo: Mike Kane/Wired.com
Google Instant on a PC browser has always been a clever idea in search of a use case. With the new mobile beta for Android and iOS, the search giant has found its first.
“Wouldn’t it be great to have Google Instant on mobile devices, where each keystroke and page load is much slower and you frequently have just a moment to find the information you need?” writes Google engineer Steve Kanefsky.
Indeed. With fast hands and a full QWERTY keyboard, the time between typing “Google Instant” and “Google Ins” is minimal. On a non-PC keyboard like a phone, e-reader or remote control, it’s considerable.
To activate the beta, you need to be running Android 2.2 (Froyo) or iOS. Then go to google.com in your mobile browser and tap the Google Instant “Turn on” link beneath the search box.
The only trouble with Google Instant on mobile devices is the net connection. Google Instant works by making server calls with each stroke. To even make it work in a mobile browser, google had to create a new AJAX and HTML5 implementation to dynamically update the page with new results.
On a good Wi-Fi network, that’s no big deal. On 3G, it’s not a major problem. On (gasp) EDGE, it can actually make search much, much slower.
“With Google Instant on mobile, we’re pushing the limits of mobile browsers and wireless networks,” Kanefsky writes. “Since the quality of any wireless connection can fluctuate, we’ve made it easy to enable or disable Google Instant without ever leaving the page. Just tap the ‘Turn on’ or ‘Turn off’ link.”
From the Department of Plastic Crap, we bring you the Tactile+Plus, a pleonastically-named set of widgets that stick onto your smartphone’s screen and mimic the feel of a real game control-pad.
The little nubbins solve the big problem of touch-screen gaming: you have to keep looking down to see where your fingers should be. By putting an nine-dot circle (one centre spot and eight directions) over the virtual D-pad, and up to four other plastic warts over any on-screen buttons, you can make sure you’re always touching the right spot.
Presumably (it’s hard to tell, as the site follows Japanese tradition by putting all the specs into an untranslatable JPG), the conductive goodness of your fingers is, well, conducted to the capacitive screen below. This means that, although this is seen on an iPhone in the picture, it should work with any modern smartphone.
Ironically, the product shot shows Streetfighter IV. This game is clearly desperate for some tactile feedback, but it also has a lot of special moves which need you to slide your finger around the D-pad. Easy on a moving, rocking switch, but less so on top of unmoving nubbins.
The Tactile+Plus can be ordered now, from Japan, for ¥630, or around $7.80. Hopefully some enterprising Westerner will import them.
Maybe Apple approved Skyfire, an iPhone web browser that plays Flash videos, to prove a point: Flash is losing relevance.
Despite widespread excitement over the first app to work with Adobe’s plug-in, it turns out that Skyfire isn’t very useful.
My hands-on time with the app, which came out Wednesday (and quickly “sold out,” according to the developer’s press release), was an eye-opening experience. The app’s primary function is to take websites that use embedded Flash video and automatically transcode that video into HTML5 so that it’s viewable on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. To test it, I had to find a popular website loaded with Flash video.
The search was difficult.
I looked at several video-heavy websites, only to realize they were already HTML5-ready. Examples include The Onion, DailyMotion, ESPN, CollegeHumor and CNET. The biggest video websites — YouTube and Vimeo — have moved to HTML5, too.
(Note that Skyfire only displays Flash video — not games, animations, ads, etc.)
Eventually a Twitter follower pointed me to a website where Skyfire really came in handy: CWTV. When Skyfire detected I was trying to play a Flash video, a play button popped up at the bottom of the browser, and the app did its job: Within 5 seconds I was streaming an episode of Smallville. (Hurray, I guess.)
There are some other Flash-dependent websites that work well on Skyfire, like the Daily Show and Colbert Report.
But the browser didn’t play all Flash videos. I loaded the TED Talks website, which is a gallery of Flash videos, and Skyfire didn’t transcode the videos. I tried playing a Flash video on CNN.com, and Skyfire didn’t transcode it, either. But it doesn’t matter so much in those cases, because there are already iOS apps for both TED Talks and CNN, which are capable of playing their videos.
Another major exception is Hulu, whose videos are encoded in Flash. But it’s not Skyfire’s fault that you can’t view Hulu videos. Because of licensing terms, the company doesn’t allow mobile devices to stream Hulu videos for free, as you could with a computer by visiting Hulu.com.
Instead, the company wants you to pay a monthly subscription fee through the Hulu iOS app. If you try visiting Hulu.com through Skyfire, you get a message saying it’s not supported.
Frankly I had a tough time finding reasons to use Skyfire. My hands-on testing of the app made me feel that Flash doesn’t matter anymore (not nearly as much as it used to before the iPad hit stores in April).
But Skyfire was a hot seller when it launched Wednesday — so hot that the developers pulled it from the store because of traffic overload, then labeled it “sold out.”
All this leads me to conclude that the underlying reason is the one big chunk of the web that’s still not available on the iPhone or iPad: free porn. Indeed, many porn-streaming websites still rely on Flash.
That makes me believe that the tipping point for Flash to become irrelevant is when the most-popular porn sites shift to HTML5. My “research” tells me that day isn’t far away.
In the meantime, Skyfire may have only limited utility for most of the web, but it makes a fine porn browser.
Binatone, purveyor of cheap “TV-games” and faux-Walkmans back in 1980s Britain, has come out with a rather weird new product. It’s a DECT cordless home telephone, and it runs Android.
I know, right? Who the hell would buy that? But take a moment to consider this: The iHomePhone is more like an oversized iPod Touch for the home, only – in some ways – better. Not only does it have Wi-Fi and a 320 x 240 2.8-inch screen, it’ll run any apps that a regular Android phone would run. There is also a headphone jack on the handset itself, along with an FM radio, plus stereo speakers in the base station, which looks a lock like a dock you might by for an iDevice.
It starts to make more sense, doesn’t it? A pocket-sized music and entertainment gadget which just happens to ring when somebody calls you. Add in a 14-minute answer-machine for when you’re too busy watching YouTube or checking your email to actually answer a call and this could be a great upgrade to your tired old dog and bone.
Tech-wise, the version of Android is unspecified, the battery will run for 80-hours on standby with 8-hours of talk-time and there is a microSD-slot for storage.
The really great part is that it will cost just £100, or $160, and is of course contract-free. Available in time for Christmas.
Software upgrades are supposed to fix things, but sometimes they do the opposite.
Disgruntled about the effects of an operating system update on her iPhone, a customer wants to battle Apple in court with a class action lawsuit.
San Diego resident Bianca Wofford last week filed a lawsuit seeking class action status, alleging that Apple committed false advertising and unfair and deceptive business practices by encouraging iPhone 3G users to download iOS 4, the latest version of Apple’s mobile OS. Wofford claims that even though the iOS upgrade promises fixes and improvements, it made her second-generation iPhone unusable.
“The true fact of the matter … is that the iOS 4 is a substantial ‘downgrade’ for earlier iPhone devices and renders many of them virtually useless iBricks” (.pdf), Wofford’s lawyers wrote in the complaint.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Apple’s iOS operating system has received a major upgrade once a year, and the company has disclosed that some new features do not work with older handsets, because they carry less memory or slower processors. When Apple announced iOS 4, it said that multitasking would not work on the second-generation iPhone, for example, but it would be supported on newer handsets. Also, Apple said iOS 4 was not compatible with the original iPhone at all — but it was supposed to work with the more recent iPhone 3G.
However, when iOS 4 shipped in the summer, some iPhone 3G customers complained that the update caused performance to become very sluggish. Months later at Apple’s Apple TV press conference, Steve Jobs said iOS 4.1 would address performance issues on the iPhone 3G. Some tests showed that iOS 4.1 improved the iPhone 3G’s performance only slightly.
In her complaint, Wofford claims that Apple was aware that iOS 4 would cause degraded performance on older iPhones, and she accused Apple of purposely creating an incentive for customers to purchase newer iPhones.
“Apple has falsely, intentionally and repeatedly represented to owners and consumers of the iPhone 3G that its new operating system for the device, iOS4, was of a nature, quality, and a significant upgrade for the functionality of all iPhone devices, when in fact, the installation and use of the iOS4 on iPhone 3G resulted in the opposite — a device with little more use than that of a paperweight,” the complaint read.
Wofford’s suit, filed in state court in San Diego County, requires approval from a judge to gain class action status. If it became a class action suit and is won, Apple could be forced to pay damages to iPhone 3G customers.
Steve Jobs has successfully prevented Adobe Flash from getting on the iPhone for years, but a new iOS app promises to bring Flash video to the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch without upsetting the CEO.
Demonstrated below, Skyfire is a web browser that automatically transcodes Flash video into HTML5 so it can display on your iDevice (instead of the blue Lego block symbolizing a lack of Flash support).
To our knowledge, Skyfire will be the first app of its kind to offer a roundabout method for watching Flash videos, when it goes live in the App Store this week.
Apple has prohibited Flash from running on iOS devices ever since the original iPhone launched in 2007. In an open letter published in April, Jobs said Flash was the No. 1 reason Macs crash, and he didn’t wish to “reduce reliability” on iOS products. In the same letter, Jobs vocalized his support for HTML5, a new web standard that does not rely on plug-ins.
“New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too),” Jobs said.
The Skyfire app only transcodes Flash videos into HTML5 — not games. A Skyfire representative said the Skyfire app was developed with oversight and feedback from Apple.
“It adheres to every guideline put forth by Apple regarding HTML5 video playback for iOS,” the rep said. “Skyfire will allow consumers to play millions of Flash videos on Apple devices without the technical problems for which Jobs banned Flash.”
The app was submitted late August, and it will go live in the App Store on Thursday.
Typing on small virtual keyboards can be hard. 8pen, like Swype, is an alternate text entry program that uses continuous gestures, but instead of navigating a QWERTY keyboard, you use a click-wheel-like spiral motion to select text. It’s out today for Android, with versions for iOS, Windows, remotes and even game controllers in the works.
The best analogy I can offer for 8pen’s interface, again, is the old iPod click wheel. The screen is divided into four quadrants with an X. You begin at the center. Moving into each quadrant selects one of eight characters. A clockwise or counterclockwise movement cuts that character list in half. Then, one, two, three, or four “clicks” through each sector selects the first, second, third, or fourth character. In practice, each gesture amounts to a partial circle.
There are also definable custom gestures for stock phrases or names. I think this is actually the most interesting part of the application.
8pen claims to solve two problems: first, the fact that QWERTY screens optimized for two hands can’t be used that way; and second, that our current software keyboards make it too difficult to type blind. (Take a moment and think about how often you look at a virtual keyboard and how often you look at a physical keyboard.)
How effective could 8pen be? Well, that depends in part on how easy it is to learn.
We know a little bit about how users learn how to use new interfaces. Users have an easier time translating skills from familiar technologies. The QWERTY keyboard, however cramped, is a familiar technology, which is why we use it even in cases where it’s suboptimal. 8pen claims its gestures are closer to handwriting. Add the click-wheel interface, and there is a technology base, however weak, that users can draw on.
Users also have a harder time learning new technologies when they know old, incompatible ones really well. If you’re comfortable using a QWERTY keyboard, and particularly a miniaturized hardware or software keyboard, the costs of switching to a new interface are too high.
It’s like switching to Windows 7 when you know XP inside and out: even if it’s objectively a superior system, you can get more done using the tool you know best. There has to be a crisis to force a move — sort of like how the hurdles and reputation of Windows Vista led a lot of users to take a long hard look at Mac OS X.
One problem I see with 8pen is the way it’s framed. First, smartphone typing may not use all of both hands, but it does use more than one finger, whether it’s two thumbs, a thumb and an index finger, or some combination of these. I find myself using at least my thumb, index and middle fingers on both hands most of the time. (I am a fast typist with very large hands.)
Taking these extra resources off-screen doesn’t seem likely to speed things up. It forces us to type with one finger, when one-finger typing is actually the problem.
Second, it’s hard to type blind on a smartphone because the text entry surface and the screen are on the same plane. On a laptop, desktop or clamshell, the screen and text surface are separated, with the screen on the vertical plane and text entry on the horizontal.
This is actually an advantage for the smartphone in some ways, because it brings the eye and hand together like in manuscript writing. It’s a problem because there isn’t a natural orientation for both reading and writing, so we usually wind up hunched over a diagonal screen.
This is my skeptical take. More optimistically, I think it’s promising that companies are experimenting with text entry on touchscreens. There are huge numbers of people venturing into touchscreen text entry who don’t have lots of experience with smartphone typing, or even as much hardware keyboard typing than those of us who bang away on computers all day.
Meanwhile, frequent text entry is venturing into more and more devices — television sets, electronic readers, remote controls. If someone can create a system that’s easy to learn, relatively intuitive and reliable, there is a huge opportunity for the company that gets it right.
A new report reveals that Apple’s iPhone has become the most popular handset in the United States, while Google’s Android platform dominates as the most popular phone operating system.
Technology research firm Canalys on Monday published its report on Q3/2010 U.S. smartphone market share. The data positions Android as the leading operating system, with 9.1 million Android-powered smartphones shipped during the quarter — 43.6 percent of the market.
Meanwhile, Apple shipped 5.5 million iPhones, which gives it a 26.2 percent share of the market, making iOS the No. 2 phone operating system. However, because iPhones are the only handsets running iOS, this figure also makes the iPhone the most popular piece of hardware in the phone market.
Before you Android and iPhone cheerleaders go off on each other in the comments, consider that these numbers are exactly what Apple and Google were shooting for, given their different mobile strategies. Apple, a hardware company, has achieved its goal of using an exclusive operating system to sell a lot of phones. And Google has achieved platform dominance with its more “open” strategy of offering Android to any manufacturer to use on any phone.
So while these numbers are huge, they’re not that surprising. I’m more curious about how market share numbers will look next year after new Windows Phone 7 handsets have been on shelves for a while. As I mentioned in a previous post, Microsoft’s mobile approach (i.e., sharing the OS only with manufacturers who meet quality standards) is combining the strengths of both Apple’s and Google’s mobile strategies, so it should be interesting to see how consumers react.
Updated 2:30 p.m. PT to correct an error on the number of iPhones sold during the quarter.
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