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Eager for a piece of WP7? Here are the top phones you should consider, broken down by US carrier. You’re welcome. More »

Joe Belfiore, Microsoft’s man in charge of mobile, has a favorite word when he talks about Windows Phone 7: “holistic.” The company’s mobile infrastructure underwent a sea change to make an operating system based on what users want, which required retooling its entire phone manufacturing and design strategy.

It even involved building robots, like the one pictured above, to make sure handsets work like you expect them to.

Joe Belfiore, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows Phone Program Management. Photo: Mike Kane/Wired.com

“We’re taking responsibility holistically for the product,” Belfiore said. “It’s a very human-centric way of thinking about it. A real person is going to pick up a phone in their hand, choose one, buy it, leave the store, configure it and live with it for two years. That’s determined by the hardware, software, application and services. We’re trying to think about all those parts such that the human experience is great.”

Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft’s complete do-over of a mobile operating system after the earlier Windows Mobile plummeted in market share and popularity in the wake of Apple’s consumer-savvy iPhone and Google’s prolific Android devices.

Referred to as “7″ by the engineers developing the OS, the project has been in the works since December 2008, when Microsoft decided to scrap all of its efforts on Windows Mobile 7, which would have been an iteration of the older operating system largely focused on business customers.

At a New York press conference on Monday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will announce hardware and carrier partners who will be supporting the operating system when the first Windows Phone 7 smartphones finally ship November. AT&T will be speaking at the event as well, suggesting that the telecom company will be among the initial carriers offering the OS.

In exclusive interviews with Wired.com, Microsoft staff spoke about the radical transformation in mobile strategy that was necessary to make Windows Phone 7 possible. The company had to purchase brand new lab facilities, hire and shuffle around top managers and reorganize its entire design department to rethink mobile.

Belfiore explained that years ago with Windows Mobile, the process was such that a mobile carrier and manufacturer would determine the features they wanted on a phone, and then they’d issue a list of specific instructions to OS makers such as Microsoft. This M.O. led to the creation of Windows Mobile, which has been knocked by critics (and even some of Microsoft’s own designers) for being overloaded with features and unfriendly to users.

“It was trying to put too much functionality in front of the user at one time as it could, and it resulted in an experience that was a little cluttered and overwhelming for taste for a lot of people today,” said Bill Flora, a design director at Microsoft. “It felt computerey.”

However, after Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, Steve Jobs rewrote the rules of the wireless game. He slyly negotiated an arrangement with AT&T to carry the iPhone without even showing the carrier the phone. As a result, Apple was able to tightly control the design of the iPhone’s OS and hardware to deliver a mobile experience tailored for the customer to enjoy rather than the carrier.

In the aftermath of the iPhone, manufacturers have been racing to deliver competitive smartphones tailored to quality consumer experiences. And Microsoft acknowledges that Windows Phone 7 is benefiting from this paradigm shift.

“The success of the iPhone certainly had an impact on the industry and an impact on us,” Belfiore said. “And we said there were a lot of things we could do to deliver a solution that’s different from the iPhone but have some of its benefits.”

Maybe you just recently bought the phone of your dreams. Maybe you’re due for an upgrade. In any event, the phone you coveted six months ago is probably not the one you’re coveting now. So which would you buy today? More »

BlackBerry OS? Dead! iOS? Dead! Symbian? Never stood a chance. Android’s exponential growth has today been illustrated by Nielsen‘s statisticians who present us with the above chart of recent US smartphone purchases. It shows that over the six months leading up to August 2010, 32 percent of American new phone buyers had grabbed themselves a device with Google’s OS on board, which is comfortably ahead of RIM at 26 percent and Apple at 25 percent. These results corroborate NPD’s figures on the matter — which peg Android at 33 percent of new US purchases — and reiterate the idea that Android is headed to a place whose name starts with D and ends with omination. One more chart showing total market share can be found after the break (hint: BlackBerry still reigns supreme overall).

Continue reading Android is number one OS among US phone buyers over the last six months

Android is number one OS among US phone buyers over the last six months originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 Oct 2010 12:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chicago resident Matt Sallee’s life is a never-ending sprint that mostly takes place in his phone. At 5 in the morning the alarm goes off, and during his train commute the 29-year-old rolls through 50 e-mails he received overnight on his BlackBerry.

As a manager of global business development at an LED company, Sallee works in time zones spanning three continents.

“I love having 10 different things cooking at once, but for me it’s all moving in little pieces, and when it comes time that there are big deliverables needed, I don’t have to scramble at the last minute,” Sallee said. “It’s an hour of combining all the little pieces into one thing, and it’s done.”

It’s not news the “always-on network” is eradicating the borders between home and office, and changing the way people work and play. But how much distraction can one person take? Research is still in the early stages, and there is little hard evidence that 24/7 access to information is bad for you. But the image of frantic, distracted workers scrabbling harder than ever for ever-diminishing social and economic returns is an attractive target for critics.

Not only is it annoying to see people chatting on cellphones in the popcorn line at the cinema, these devices — and the multitasking they encourage — could be taking a massive toll on our psyches, and perhaps even fundamentally altering the way our brains are wired, some dystopian-minded critics suggest.

Is the smartphone –- like Google, TV, comics and the movies before it –- actually making us dumb?

Fractured Concentration?

Some of the latest arguments to critique this 24/7 online culture include the book The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, who argues that the internet is rewiring us into shallow, inattentive thinkers, along with a New York Times feature series by Matt Richtel titled “Your Brain on Computers,” a collection of stories examining the possible negative consequences of gadget overload.

(Disclosure: I’m currently writing a book called Always On that explores similar topics.)

Giving credence to such claims, an oft-cited Stanford study published last year found that people who were rated “heavy” multitaskers were less able to concentrate on a single task and also worse at switching between tasks than those who were “light” multitaskers.

“We have evidence that high multitaskers are worse at managing their short-term memory and worse at switching tasks,” said Clifford Nass, a Stanford University professor who led the study. He’s author of the upcoming book The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships.

One test asked students to recall the briefly glimpsed orientations of red rectangles surrounded by blue rectangles. The students had to determine whether the red rectangles had shifted in position between different pictures. Those deemed heavy multitaskers struggled to keep track of the red rectangles, because they were having trouble ignoring the blue ones.

To measure task-switching ability, another test presented participants with a letter-and-number combination, like b6 or f9. Subjects were asked to do one of two tasks: One was to hit the left button if they saw an odd number and the right for an even; the other was to press the left for a vowel and the right for a consonant.

They were warned before each letter-number combination appeared what the task was to be, but high multitaskers responded on average half-a-second more slowly when the task was switched.

The Stanford study is hardly undisputed. A deep analysis recently published by Language Log’s Mark Liberman criticized the study for its small sample group: Only 19 of the students who took the tests were deemed “heavy multitaskers.”

He added that there also arises an issue of causality: Were these high multitaskers less able to filter out irrelevant information because their brains were damaged by media multitasking, or are they inclined to engage with a lot of media because they have easily distractable personalities to begin with?

“What’s at stake here is a set of major choices about social policy and personal lifestyle,” Liberman said. “If it’s really true that modern digital multitasking causes significant cognitive disability and even brain damage, as Matt Richtel claims, then many very serious social and individual changes are urgently needed.”

“Before starting down this path, we need better evidence that there’s a real connection between cognitive disability and media multitasking (as opposed to self-reports of media multitasking),” he added. “We need some evidence that the connection exists in representative samples of the population, not just a couple of dozen Stanford undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology.”

Other research also challenges the conclusions of the Stanford study. A University of Utah study published this year discovered some people who are excellent at multitasking, a class whom researchers dubbed “supertaskers.”

Researchers Jason Watson and David Strayer put 200 college undergrads through a driving simulator, where they were required to “drive” behind a virtual car and brake whenever its brake lights shone, while at the same time performing various tasks, such as memorizing and recalling items in the correct order and solving math problems.

Watson and Strayer analyzed the students based on their speed and accuracy in completing the tasks. The researchers discovered that an extremely small minority — just 2.5 percent (three men and two women) of the subjects — showed absolutely no performance loss when performing dual tasks versus single tasks. In other words, these few individuals excelled at multitasking.

Also in contrast with the results of the Stanford study, the supertaskers were better at task-switching and performing individual tasks than the rest of the group.

The rest of the group, on the other hand, did show overall degraded performance when handling dual tasks compared to a single task, suggesting that the vast majority of people might indeed be inadequate at processing multiple activities. But the discovery of supertaskers argues with the ever-popular notion that human brains are absolutely not meant to multitask, Watson and Strayer say, and it shows that this area of research is still very much unexplored.

“Our results suggest that there are supertaskers in our midst — rare but intriguing individuals with extraordinary multitasking ability,” Watson and Strayer wrote. “These individual differences are important, because they challenge current theory that postulates immutable bottlenecks in dual-task performance.”