Be Excellent To Each Other

So, we've not had a proper thread about this, and I don't particularly want to clutter up the iPhone/Pad threads with talk about it.

Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday, and I was surprised. It's early days, but it actually looks like they've hired a few UI designers, and allowed some of their more 'out there' engineers to have some input. More importantly, they do seem to have abandoned their age old problems of compatibility - it looks like 7 will not run apps developed for 6.5 or earlier. It's got to be a bitter pill for the developers, but it's the only way they can do any innovating.

So, I'm tentatively interested. I want to see what they can do with it - it's due out Christmas 2010, and my contract expires Feb 2011, so we'll see what happens. I would love to see a mobile gaming platform using XBL for managing friends, leaderboards, and cheeeeeeevos.

Gizmodo have a fairly decent round-up:

http://gizmodo.com/tag/windowsphone7/

And here's a promo type video:

The side-scrolly stuff if a lot like the Zune interface.
But I am interested, too. It does seem a long way away, though.

Still 2 years away all this isn't it.

Looks good though.

Will the cheezos force Dimrill to get rid of his Nokia?!

No - it's end of this year.

XBox Live is a huge advantage to them if they get it right.

ZOMFGWTF!? WANT

Will it be cheaper than the JesusPhone? Surely it will kick off a pricing war.

Perhaps. Pricing wars I can live without, it's technology wars we want.

I can see some definite potential problems with WinMo7, first and formost I really don't want to have to install software on my PC just to put some bloody MP3s on my phone, and I don't have any interest in things like the Zune marketplace for buying music, so I would hope that UI elements to do with the zune marketplace can be easily removed. But considering it is not possibly to remove bits of the Xbox Live marketplace you don't want, I am not certain that this will be possible.

Similarly, from what I can tell, it should be easy to add new services (like, say, twitter integration, or google search instead of bing search), but we've not heard anything like that yet.

If they can offer a large amount of user freedom, whilst keeping that slick UI, then they are on to something. They've got my attention, which I don't think they would have been able to do with anything that was just a natural progression of WinMo6.5, but until more details are out, I don't really know for sure if it is for me.


Edit: I also like the fairly rigid hardware spec idea. I imagine that it means that all handsets will run well, with scope of manufacturers to make differentiating features (although I'd be a bit concerned about them skimping on any area that doesn't have a microsoft enforced standard (like battery life maybe)).

I'd like to remover the Shares app from my iPod plz.

I'm not so sure; it's certainly an advantage (if Apple could go back in time to iPhone OS v1 but know how busy the App Store would be for games, I think they'd at least consider an OS-wide gaming social network), but I think the deep Facebook integration is more of a feature in the minds of most consumers. There's a lot more Facebook users than Xbox, and the overlap between "hardcore" Xbox gamers and the casual style games that work well on phones is smaller still.

In semi-related news, I was amused to see a Palm Pre app that schedules the phone to reboot at 3am each day, so to clean up after memory leaking background applications. I wonder if MS will allow background apps only under some sort of sandbox, with strict resource limits.

Bad day in the curry and bitter markets?

I saw that, and most of the comments were asking if there was actually any need for it. There are reboot applications for Android and iPhone, but automatic ones on the iPhone are for hacked versions only (obv).


It's not that hard - the first step is to ask in a thread that isn't about a fucking Windows phone.

I've lost a mint in Raita

There's a quote buried in that gizmodo coverage that strongly suggests there will only be multitasking under strong limits. It indicates that, like the iPhone, things like your music will be able to play will other things are running, but 3rd party apps will most likely be limited to things like live updating on the tiles - which would be great for a twitter app, for example.

The combination of widget/launcher is neat-o-matic, and I like the strong typography and general look of the OS. I'll reiterate a point I've made to you previously: enterprise launches have to be done a looong time ahead, but consumer launches are best kept secret until launch day. Apple do this well, Microsoft have (to my mind) fumbled this one; how many people's reaction went along the lines of "oooh, that looks quite nice. I'll go a phone shop and try that out... oh, but not until Christmas?!"

Also on that topic:

Who rubbed their cock on your cornflakes? Only said it in response to Lewies comment about apps/GUI customisation.

I suspect we'll see Apple introducing some background tasking APIs to iPhone OS soon. I think we won't see true backgrounding of the apps as we see them now, but rather some sort of support in the OS for daemon threads that have tight memory and CPU restrictions coupled with limited ability to interact with the OS for things like notifications.

Oh and "Windows Phone 7 Series" is a shit name. It has at least one too many words in it.

WinPho, foo'!

WinBile 7.

Winnie-the-Phone 7 does indeed look quite nice, though I haven't watched any videos yet. I was genuinely surprised to see an interface that looks designed for once, though I do admit I didn't ‘get’ it straight away – it looked like the elements slightly cut off were a lazy bit of design, but it's actually quite a beautiful way of letting the user know there're more things to see without adding cumbersome scrollbars or other such indicators: neat.

No Flash, apparently.

Oooh. That's interesting. Related: the latest builds of Firefox for Maemo (the Nokia Linux distro used on their tablets and the N900) has removed the Flash plugin for performance reasons.

No lots of stuff yet. Fanboys (I'm looking at Mr Grannell in particular) are making as much noise about that (and the lack of copy/paste, etc) as they can, but considering it's not out for nearly a year no-one knows dick yet. They haven't said "No Flash", but "The version we saw didn't do Flash".
Older Windows phones did Flash, although that's no indicator of what would happen here.

Indeed, it's too early to tell if it's a decision or just left out for now. Doesn't bother me either way: I really don't care for Flash, but apparently lots of people do for some reason.

Okay, I'm interested in this. Windows Mobile 5 was so fucking gash I didn't think I'd ever consider another Windows phone, but this looks like it could be very nice indeed.

but isn't that the same as push notifications for the iPhone?

From a network perspective, yes - but actually allowing the tiles on the front of the phone to dynamically update and change is a step beyond just a little red number in the corner of the icon.

Dashboard!

I'd like to make this my first post, I apologise to the fanboys in advance.

iPhone and iPad = rubbish.

I am more than a tad curious about a Windows 7 phone, though I can't imagine the app store will be much cop.

Interesting.

Hello!

Manchester, eh?

Yes, I spotted that grand day out thingymajig that the world seems to attending but I'm too partial to my own safety around forty or so slightly rotund nerds.

Being one myself, I testify to the depravity of Manchester.

This post is awful, excuse me...

That Windows phone looks as shite to use as the iphone & other touch screen phones (my big spacky thumbs don't like them). Might be able to live with one if I liked playing games on phones though.


Hello, Arkham Asylum.

Two unsurprising things have been confirmed:
1) games have Achievements, unified with Xbox Live and Games for Windows Live
2) it will have a Microsoft-run app store and that will be the only way to get apps onto your device.

I would expect getting into the app store to be strict-ish, as in XNA and the iPhone App Store, rather than simple, as in the Android store.

not liking the cheevos thing at all.

I'm all about maxing out games, if 'games' suddenly includes some piss-poor phone shit then that'll cheapen the whole thing.

then again, I don't even allow PC games on my gamercard.

if it's backwards compatible with WM6 then it'd mean that I could run the awesome PPC version of King's Bounty on there though. That'd be worthwhile.

*splutter* *cough* Yes, that's clearly worse than "100,000 kills in GoW2".

It isn't.

Hmmm, this could be the OS to convince me to ditch the iPhone as that has become my mobile gaming platform of choice (anyone want a black DS Lite with GTA:CW, btw?). It would have to be something special UI-wise, though, and looking at track-record I think going from Apple to MS would be a bit of a backwards step in that regard.

I've just had a Microsoft guy tell me how excited they are to be providing Bing on WindowsPhone7. Only, it's apparently not a search engine, it's a "decision engine". FFS.

Hehe.



No shit, Sherlock.

Cock off, Marketers.

Try having a whinge on Twatter using the #Bing hashtag and enjoy the bombardment of shilling cunts that will come your way.

That's not what I meant by cheap. That particular achv (one that I want absolutely no part of) is drawn-out and grindy.

By cheap I mean that any piss-poor phone app can now provide people with a max.

It'd be like putting gamerscore on XNA games.

Kotaku says it will also be following the iPhone in not having multitasking except for specific MS apps.

It's not quite like that. What they're doing, which I quite like, is having the 'tiles' on the home screen be active and capable of receiving updates. So, for example, your facebook tile will be getting notifications of new updates and displaying them onscreen without you having to actually have the app running, for example.

I think it's quite an interesting approach, and certainly an improvement over just having a little '1' in the corner of the icon, but whether it quite ventures into the realm of being multitasking, I'm not sure.

Some might say that playing shit like Avatar for an easy 1,000GS is cheapening achievements, though. Chinatown Wars deserves at least 200GS in my mind, as it's easily as good as the top XBLA games.

Oooh, nice. I like that a lot.

I think the idea that some games are more 'properer' than others and so 'deserve' more 'gamerpoints' to be amazingly abstract, meta and messed up.

Also, it is kind of silly to actually care about gamerscore and/or achievements.

It's what I would choose to have in the iPhone, too. I think this sort of "managed multitasking" is the right answer on a mobile device. Oh, Microsoft have some sort of background music streaming solution planned, too, apparently. All good stuff.

It's amusing how similar this is to the iPhone in so many ways that, in the past, the iPhone has been criticised for.

It's kind of silly to care about games, in that case.
Some people like them, some people go "meh".