HTC & LG to be first to ship WM7 phones
Many of us had written off Microsoft in the mobile phone market, but last week Microsoft unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a new operating system and a fresh approach to the mobile platform that could — for the first time in a very long time — give Apple and Google something to worry about.
Gone is the infuriating menu system, the uninspiring design, the endless bugs; the new-look Windows Phone makes all of that seem like a bad dream.
The new Windows Phone interface draws heavily on that of the Zune, the Microsoft personal media player that has never made it to this side of the Atlantic, but is present on the Xbox360. The new Windows Phone interface has big, bold, over-sized graphics that jump out of the screen and dominate the page, and the whole navigation system feels fresh and lively.
Contacts are cleverly arranged with a one-click access and are arranged in order of “importance”, from those friends and family you interact with most appearing further up the page, and those you contact infrequently pushed down the virtual pecking order
It’s a dynamic user experience that will change over time, in real time, depending on the ebb and flow of your daily life. There’s even a “What’s New” section, which pulls in social-networking updates from your contacts, straight from sites such as Facebook. At the moment there’s no Twitter support yet — a glaring omission — but expect this to be rectified by the time the first Windows Phones launch at the end of the year.
Pictures are cleverly handled too, in their own virtual gallery with plenty of linking to and from photo-sharing and social-networking profiles. The Music + Video hub is where users will go to sync songs and movie files, while the Games hub is going to excite a lot of people — it syncs your Xbox Live gaming profile with the phone, complete with avatar and gaming points.
Microsoft recognises that mobile gaming has been one of the iPhone’s biggest successes, so expect to see Windows Phone becoming the closest thing we’re going to get to a handheld Xbox 360.
Microsoft is keen to balance the demands of users’ business and personal lives with the Windows Mobile OS, so it has an Office hub, that’s synced to the cloud, and can be used to open and edit documents. There’s push email support too, of course, through Microsoft Exchange.
Microsoft is expected to launch their new OS later this year and HTC and LG are reportedly going to be the first manufactures to take advantage of the new OS.
