Hasta La Gadget!

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would introduce new features to the Zune HD with a firmware upgrade in the spring. No, it’s not ready yet, but Microsoft is back to tantalize with details.

Here’s what you can expect with the free download, which will be available in the next few weeks:

• Smart DJ: This feature is already available on the Zune, and now it’s coming to the Zune HD. With it, you can create an instant playlist mix in seconds by selecting a song or artist from your collection or the Zune Marketplace and pressing the Smart DJ icon. The software will create a new mix based on your selection. If you have a Zune Pass music subscription, it will pull music both from your collection and the Zune Marketplace catalog.
• Picks: Another music recommendation feature now coming the Zune HD, Picks analyzes what you listen to and compares that to millions of other Zune users to deliver personalized recommendations. You’ll be able to listen to these recommendations on your Zune HD or on your computer.
• Zune Marketplace improvements: You’ll now be able to browse and stream music from the Zune Marketplace on your TV when using the Zune HD A/V dock. It sounds like a great way to add a soundtrack to any party.
• Expanded Video Codec Support: The Zune HD will now play MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP) videos, and includes Xvid and AVI support.

Looks like someone at Microsoft should be paying slightly more attention to the mail: an ophthalmologist (yes, that’s right) in Illinois named Edward Yavitz is suing Redmond over the Zune’s Buy From FM feature, saying he wrote the software giant a letter in 2006 that disclosed his two relevant patents on the tech, suggested how it could be integrated into the Zune, and asked for a deal. Two years and presumably zero replies later, a young Joe Belfiore introduced Buy From FM along with the Zune 3.0 software, which Ed says directly infringes on his patents — and his lawsuit, filed ten days ago, asks the court to permanently stop sales of the Zune and award him triple damages in cash. Oops. We haven’t dived too deeply into the patents themselves, but it looks like Ed’s going to have a bit of a fight on his hands here, as the patents seem to describe systems that have preloaded content about music that’s then accessed when a data trigger is received over the air, not just storing song information for later purchase over the Internet. We’re sure the good doctor’s attorneys have some high-powered arguments to the contrary, so we’ll withhold judgment and see where this all leads — we’re guessing a quick settlement is in the cards, as fighting Microsoft might end up actually costing more than any percentage of royalties on total sales of the Zune.

P.S.- If you’re wondering why Apple hasn’t been named for its similar iTunes Tagging feature… well, so are we. We’ll see what happens.

Microsoft facing patent lawsuit over Zune Buy From FM feature originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You can download the Windows Phone 7 SDK right now from this link. Make us some good stuff, programmers. [Windows Phone Developer]

Windows Phone 7 Series: It’s a thing! And it looks pretty great, so far. Last month’s announcement, though, left a lot of questions. Questions which are answered here, in Gizmodo’s live updated coverage of Microsoft’s MIX 2010 keynote.

How exactly will multitasking work? What about those incredible cross platform game demos? Whither WinMo 6.x, and its devs? (And what’s with this “Classic” and “Starter Edition” business?) What happens to the Zune? Will we see more hardware? What about the mysterious Chassis 3? Why are developers already worried? We’ve got at least an hour here, folks, so expect answers. Lots of answers.

New Features

When we met Windows Phone 7 Series, it was all about taking a first look. But we really didn’t get a great idea as to how the operating system works, underneath the Zune-like skin. Here’s are the new OS and dev features Microsoft’s announced today.

• A Push Notification Service: Called the “Microsoft Notification Service,” this sounds an awful lot like Apple’s push notification system, which lends credence to the interpretation of Microsoft’s talk about multitasking as meaning that it doesn’t really exist, or that it’s at least heavily managed. As you can see above, they pop up in a small tray at the top of the screen, rather than the obnoxious pop-up system that the iPhone uses.

• A Microsoft Location Service: This is like a clearing house for location data, or “single point of reference to acquire location information.” This is more of a developer tool than anything else, I think, but it suggest location service’s being totally and easily accessible, and not just in terms of raw data. This is basically just Bing everywhere, in both user and developer terms.

• Silverlight, Silverlight, Silverlight: Windows Phone 7 apps are largely developed in Silverlight, which you probably only know as that plugin you had to install that one time to watch the Olympics. It can also create apps that are significantly more complicated than video players.

• Dev Tools Will Be Free: Windows Phone 7 development tools for Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Blend (a UI dev tool) will be free to download.

• App Developers Can Start Today: The free tools are available at developer.windowsphone.com, as of right now. While developers won’t have phones for a while, they’ll have the PC emulator, which even allows for touchscreen input. (If you have a touchscreen PC, of course.)

• No Mac Dev Support: And yeah, of course, there’s no development on Mac.

The Marketplace

We didn’t even get to to see the new Windows Phone Marketplace in action in February, but now Microsoft’s pulled the curtain back.

• It’s Panoramic: It’s going to look like the rest of Windows Phone 7, which is to say, it’s going to be swipey and zoomy and all those things that made Windows Phone 7 interesting looking. You know, hubs within hubs within hubs within hubs. Hubs!

• Buying options: It’ll handle one-time credit card purchases, operator billing, and ad-supported apps.

• App trials: Microsoft is going to require developers to allow buyers to trial apps before buying them. Good for us, potentially scary for devs. UPDATE: It’s not actually a requirement, just an option. What this is, really, is an old-school app trial system: You use an app until your dev-defined trial is over, or until you get tired of the missing features, then you buy it, which instantly activates the remaining functionality, no extra download required.

• The Zune Client: You can browse the Marketplace from the Zune client, like you can access the App Store from iTunes. This gives Windows Phone 7 a leg up over the likes of Android and webOS, which limit app installation to the handset. But! The Zune software is Windows-only.

This doesn’t just mean you won’t be able to install apps from your desktop your phone on Windows Phone 7, it means that you won’t be able to sync anything with your desktop, be it music, movies or photos. And there’s no USB syncing outside of the Zune software client, so you can’t just dump media onto your phone, mass storage style. In other words, if you don’t have a PC, you can’t really listen to your music or watch your videos on your WinPho 7 phone.

• Multitasking: Like we’d said before, it’s really not there. There will be certain provisions for multitasking—music is the one Microsoft is talking about now, for app like Pandora—but there won’t be pure multitasking. (You won’t, for example, be able to run Skype or a Twitter app in the background. So, again, this is an Apple-like approach for the least Apple-like company in existence.)

&bull Copy and Paste: The current build doesn’t have it, back at launch, word was that it might not ever show up on the platform. Now, Engadget’s hearing the the final build may not be able to take text from here and put it there. This omission would be more curious, because there’s really no upside, as in the case of limiting multitasking. Also: What the hell? Also also: They’ve got at least six months to fix this.

• Only two resolution will be allowed: For the foreseeable future, Microsoft’s only allowing two resolutions—the 800×480 WVGA resolution we’ve seen on the first hardware already, and later, a 480×320 HVGA resolution—for Windows Phone 7 handsets. Developers will only have to write for two screen sizes, which helps keep developing for the platform relatively simple.

• Windows Mobile 6.x Apps Won’t Work: Scott Guthrie confirmed to us that 6.x apps would need to be ported in order to work, and that this may not be a simple process—you could, for example, carry over some interface assets, or some core .NET programming from one platform to the other, but there’ll be no simple patch from one platform to the other.

The First Apps

The first round of app partners is solid, for sure:

AWS Convergence Technologies ? WeatherBug, Citrix Systems Inc., Clarity Consulting Inc., Cypress Consulting, EA Mobile, Fandango Inc., Foursquare Labs Inc., frog design inc., Glu Mobile Inc., Graphic.ly, Hudson Entertainment Inc., IdentityMine Inc., IMDb.com Inc., Larva Labs, Match.com LLC, Matchbox Mobile Ltd., Microsoft Game Studios, Namco Networks America Inc., Oberon Media Inc., Pageonce Inc., Pandora Media Inc., Photobucket Inc., PopCap Games Inc., Seesmic, Shazam Entertainment Ltd., Sling Media, SPB Software Inc., stimulant, TeleCommunications Systems Inc., Touchality LLC and Vertigo Software Inc

We also got our first glimpse at the apps, which maintain the Windows Phone 7 aesthetic surprisingly well.

The first batch gives a preview of what Windows Phone 7 apps will be—that is to say, deeply integrated. Another instant reaction? A lot of these developers write for the iPhone and Android, which is a good sign and a bad one: A good one, because Microsoft needs these guys to reach anything resembling app parity with other platforms; and a bad one, because it drives home just how much catching up Microsoft is going to have to do come WinPho 7’s release. None of the other platforms, for what it’s worth, have paps as pretty as some of these—a point that’s really driven home when you see their 3D transforms and animations in motion:

With others, like Hush Hush, you can see that Microsoft is open to modal interfaces as well, which is to say, interfaces that look nothing like Zune or Windows Phone 7.

Since Windows Phone 7 apps are developed largely in Silverlight, you can download and incorporate Silverlight libraries that already exist. In other words, some of the interface elements, animations and icons that you’ve gotten used to seeing in Silverlight app interfaces might turn up in Windows Phone 7 apps later on. We’ll also see some services that have depended on Silverlight before easily ported to the phone. Like what? Ho ho, like mother***king Netflix (which, while shown off here, won’t necessarily get a real release):

Games, as we’ve seen a bit of before, have the potential to be great, not just because of the platform’s minimum requirements (which make the iPhone’s hardware seem downright clunky) but because of the deep Xbox Live integration. Joe Belfiore showed us a quick demo, in which he actually earned Xbox Live achievement points, er, live.

• More on Netflix for Windows Phone 7
• More on Xbox Live on Windows Phone 7

The takeaway at the end of the app demos—which made up a tremendous chunk of this keynote—is that Microsoft knows how important apps are for Windows Phone 7, or more importantly, how instrumental the lack of decent apps was in the decline of Windows Mobile 6.x. They’re going all out, claiming that devs can create apps in a matter of minutes, and (so far) coddling them as much as possible. The one thing they can’t control, though, is how fast customers pick up on Windows Phone 7 Series. Without an audience, developers won’t bother to write apps; without apps, buyers won’t bother buying Windows Phone 7 Series phones. Microsoft’s new mobile strategy may be impressive, but it could find itself stuck in a Catch-22 come release time.

All the Rest

Obviously, Microsoft didn’t run through all the stuff they’d already covered back at Mobile World Congress when Windows Phone 7 was announced, so here’s the rest of the story.

• A new piece of hardware showed its face today. (Above.) This time it’s from Samsung. Externally, it’s indistinguishable from the Omnia HD. Internally, you can assume it falls inline with Microsoft’s minimum requirements for Windows Phone 7.

• Windows Phone 7 Series: Everything Is Different Now

• Windows Phone 7: First Videos

• How Will Xbox Live Work on Windows Phone 7?

• An Epic 22-Minute Walkthrough of Windows Phone 7

• Windows Phone 7 Series Hands-On Pics and Video

• Windows Phone 7 Apps: What We Know, What We Don’t

• Microsoft, Into the Light: The Unofficial Windows Phone 7 Strategy

Windows Phone 7 is a new beginning for Microsoft, and at the same time, an ending. The epoch of the “slap our software on any old hardware” open platform is dead.

There’s a spectrum of hardware and software integration. At one end, you have the likes of Apple, RIM and Nintendo who create software and design the hardware that it runs on. It’s controlled and tightly integrated top-to-bottom. At the other end, you have the classic Microsoft model—they just create the software, and a hardware company like Dell or HTC or Joe’s Mom buys a license to install it on their machine, which they sell to you. (FWIW, Microsoft would argue they’re in the middle, with open source, that is, “unstructured openness,” down on the other, wild ‘n’ crazy end.) In the center, you have a mix—there’s still a split between software and hardware, but one side dictates more stringently what’s required of the other side, or they work more closely together, so it’s sorta integrated, but sorta not.

The Philosophy of Sorta Open vs. Sorta Closed

The integrated philosophy is summed up pretty nicely by the legendary Alan Kay, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” It’s about a better experience. Granted, today that mostly means “design their own hardware,” since very few companies actually make the hardware they sell. Take a MacBook or iPhone—sure, Apple made it pretty, but it’s actually manufactured by a company like Foxconn to Apple’s specifications. HTC and Asus, on the other hand, do design and build their own hardware, not just for themselves, but for other companies. (For instance, HTC built Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X1 and Palm’s Treo Pro.)

The other side is typically couched as a kind of openness offering choice which drives competition, and therefore, pushes innovation, as Steve Ballmer puts it: “Openness is critical because it is the foundation of choice for all of our customers…choice, which will drive competition, which is ultimately the engine of innovation and progress.” The other argument is that it creates a bigger platform for more innovation to happen on, since more stuff’s running the same software. It’s the benefit of there being hundreds of different PCs that run Windows, versus a handful that run OS X: Sheer numbers.

As for the nasty things they say about each other, the top-to-bottom guys say that the hardware-software split leads to a crappier product, because one single company’s not in charge of the experience, making sure every little bit works. Like how multitouch trackpads universally blow goats on Windows laptops. Who’s fault is that? Microsoft’s? The guys who built the laptop? Advocates of choice say that top-to-bottom integration kills innovation and hardware diversity, all the while making systems way more expensive. If you want a laptop that runs OS X, I hope you like chiclet keyboards and paying out your gnads.

Those are the basics. Microsoft, throughout its history, has mostly made software for other people to stick on their hardware. Apple has, one dark period aside, basically always designed the hardware for its software, and sold them together. Yin and yang.

The Coming Change

The Entertainment & Devices division of Microsoft, with its “Chief Experience Officer” J. Allard, is different from the rest of the company. It made the Xbox. The Xbox had—waitaminute—Microsoft software running on Microsoft hardware, which you bought together as a package. Why? Because a gaming console wouldn’t work very well as an open system, sold like a desktop computer. People buying a gaming console expect a single, integrated experience that just works. This is a historical truth: Since the NES, Nintendo, Sony and anyone else entering the business who you’ve actually heard of will only build closed boxes.

E&D also made the Zune. Why? Well, Because Microsoft’s open hardware approach bombed in the portable media player business. Miserably. The PlaysForSure ecosystem was totally schizo—effectively a multi-layered DRM released by a group whose responsibility was media formats and players for the PC. Microsoft handed out DRM, codecs and syncing software, and a partner would (pay to) make the media player, typically with third-party firmware in the middle. The players never “played for sure.” They worked, but only if you were lucky and managed to sacrifice the proper number of goats under the correct cycle of the moon on the first Saturday after the second Thursday of the month. At the same time, the iPod’s top-to-bottom, seamless ecosystem proved itself: It owns 70 percent of the MP3 player market. Microsoft realized the only way to compete was to make the software and the hardware—alienating all of their so-called “hardware partners” in the process. So, Zune. Which single-handedly slew the undead remnants of PlaysForSure and its ilk, when it wasn’t compatible with Microsoft’s own ecosystem.

But these were exceptions. They’re consumer products. Entertainment experiences. Niche products, in Ballmerspeak. Not computers. Windows Mobile started life as Pocket PC because it’s a computer you shove in your pocket. So Microsoft played it like it played the computers on your desk, an approach that worked pretty gosh darn well for ’em there.

The Long Death Spiral of Windows Mobile

You can’t really exaggerate how PC-minded Microsoft’s approach to mobile was. The ecosystem was wild and messy, getting a little more organized with the Pocket PC 2000 OS. Pocket PCs actually did adhere to a generic set of hardware specifications put out by Microsoft (not terribly unlike their Project Origami for UMPCs some years later), but there were tons of devices from tons of manufacturers, along with multiple editions of the Pocket PC software—like the Phone Edition, which tacked phone powers onto PocketPC’s PDA core. With Windows Mobile 6, Microsoft stopped calling the devices Pocket PCs. And you know where things went from there.

Smartphones—of which about 180 million were sold last year according to Gartner—are what Steve Ballmer calls a “non-niche device,” which to him, are things like TVs, PCs and phones. So the Windows model still applies, right? That’s the approach Microsoft took for years. So, just about anybody who could pay for the license could shove Windows Mobile onto their phone. Some people did great things with it, like HTC’s HD2. Other people did less awesome—okay, shitty—things.

What’s amusing is that, despite the Windows Mobile model clearly not working that well, Google came in with Android and applied basically the same strategy, except Android’s actually free to vendors—and if they agree to certain conditions, they can include Google’s applications and be branded as “Google” phones. Not surprisingly, the same strategy’s leading to the same outcome—some people do awesome things, like the Hero. Some people commit atrocities. Some software works on some Android phones and not on others. Fragmentation amok.

The philosophy at play is the same: Open platform, device choice.

Windows Phone 7 Series ends all of that for Microsoft. (Not so coincidentally, it comes out of E&D, the same division that created Xbox and Zune.) Other people still make the hardware, but Microsoft’s got an iron grip on the phone, and how software and hardware come together, more so than ever before.

When An Open Door Closes, Someone Pries Open a Window

Ballmer phrases it as “taking responsibility for the experience.” What does that entail? A Windows 7 Phone Series…phone must have a high-res capacitive 4-point multitouch display, 5-megapixel camera, FM radio, accelerometer, Wi-Fi, GPS, set CPU and GPU benchmarks, and even a particular button set that includes a dedicated search button. Very little is left to the hardware guys. The shape of the phone, and whether or not it has a keyboard, basically. And Microsoft’s only partnering with a select group of OEMs—Joe’s Mom can’t build Windows Phone 7 Series phones. (Yes, I’m going to keep writing the OS’s entire name out because it’s a dumb name)

This level of involvement is a radical break for Microsoft. It’s them admitting that the old way wasn’t good enough. That it was simply broken. That their partners effectively can’t be trusted. They have to be told exactly what to do by Microsoft, like goddamn children. It’s Microsoft finally saying, “While we can’t make our own hardware”—since phones are a mega-category, that could limit growth and once again piss off partners—”we’re serious about the software.” Coming from Microsoft? That’s huge.

It’s a necessary step, because Microsoft’s position in mobile is way different from its position in desktops, way different from the position it expected to be in. They’re not the dominant OS. They don’t lord over a vast ecosystem, commanding 90 percent of the smartphones on the planet. They’re just another competitor. Meaning they have to be different, and compelling, in a much different way than if their expectations had played out. If Microsoft was in the same position in mobile as they are on the desktop, do you think they’d be shitcanning the entirety of their mobile platform? Nope. They’d be expanding the ecosystem, working to make it more ubiquitous, more entrenched. Not a breath of fresh, rainbow-colored air.

Still, Microsoft isn’t exactly alone. Google may be shedding Android licenses like cat hair, but they’re covering their asses by following this same tack, too. I’m talking, of course, about the Nexus One. Heralded as the Google Phone. It’s the Anointed One, the truest of all Android phones. And you know why? Because Google told HTC how to build it. Google designed the phone themselves to be the exemplar of Android. It’s basically saying no other phone was good enough. Not even the Droid, released just two months before it. Google had to make it them goddamn selves. That was the only way to achieve Android perfection.

An interesting side effect is that it puts the company who made that phone, HTC, in a fairly awkward position. HTC and Asus, as I mentioned earlier, are unique: For years, they slaved in near-anonymity, making phones and PCs for the brands you’re familiar with. HTC, at one point, made 80 percent of the Windows Mobile phones out there, which were sold under monikers like the T-Mobile Dash. Now, they’re busting out with huge campaigns to be on the same brand level as the Dells and Palms of the world. They even design their own software, which is increasingly how these companies distinguish themselves, since everybody’s using basically the same guts in everything, from laptops to phones. While they obviously still make money, these OEM superstars are effectively re-marginalized, hidden by the bigger Windows brand.

Worse off, still, it would seem would be the brands who don’t make the hardware, the Dells of the world. They’re a middleman in the worst sense—their brand is squeezed, and they’re passing on guts made by another company entirely. It’s almost like, “Why do you even exist?”

Assuming Microsoft does get a toehold with Windows Phone 7, the ecosystem might loosen up. It might have to, in order to expand outward. Meanwhile the march of random third-party Android phones will keep on stomping through, but make no mistake: Microsoft and Google, former champions of the open platform, have basically admitted that the only right way to build a phone is to do what their chief rivals Apple and RIM already do: Design the software and hardware yourself. Now, they’re serious.