Windows Phone 7 Formally Released
I wasn’t going to bother doing a post on this, but I changed my mind.
In case you missed it, and if you are a tech follower you would have had to been in a coma to have missed it, Microsoft and their partners formally announced and released the Windows Phone 7 last week.
Phone 7 is getting glowing reviews even though at this point you can’t buy a Phone 7 handset. You should be able to buy a Phone 7 device in the USA at the end of this month (October) and in other parts of the world in the second week of next month. In Australia the Phone 7 handsets will initially be exclusive to Telstra.
With Phone 7 Microsoft has partnered with HTC, Samsung, LG, and DELL. The Samsung Omnia (shown below) with its super sharp AMOLED screen seems to be a favourite choice at this stage.
To see more about Phone 7 and the various other handsets being released by HTC, LG, DELL, and Samsung you can visit engadget (here) and do a search for “phone 7”. Also each of the graphics on this page links to related articles.
According to the article at Wired magazine (here) if you are into Facebook and want the phone with that best and most seamless Facebook integration then a Phone 7 phone is the phone to get. Quoting Wired: “Windows Phone 7 is the real Facebook phone”.
To see the full current selection of all nine Phone 7 mobile phones the best option is probably to go to the Microsoft Phone 7 site (here). On this site you can click on the phone that interests you and find out more information about it.
For more general background on the Phone 7 operating system you can check out the entry in Wikipedia (here). It sure does not take very long for Wikipedia to get up-to-date about things.
There are already lots of reviews being published about the Phone 7 phones. Following are few that I pulled up and had a quick look at:
- PC World Magazine, Australian edition (here).
- Australian IT News (here). This article has some pricing plan models although there are a lot of blanks in the table.
- Gizmodo, Australian edition (here).
- News.com.au (here).
There news.com.au article (linked above) has a quote from Stephen Fry, who is apparently a huge ‘Apple fan boy’.
“I never thought the day would come,” he said last night, “that I would stand on a stage and praise Microsoft for doing something they could be proud of. When I got one of these (phones) my first feeling was it's fun to play with. I have felt enormous pleasure using this phone”.
Who is Phone 7 for?
With the Phone 7 operating system and handset specifications Microsoft are attempting to pull off a very tricky manoeuvre. If they succeed at this then Phone 7 will be a huge success. If not then it will probably still be a moderate success—for a short time at least—but not the market killer they are hoping it will be.
What they have worked very hard to do is make Phone 7 a great choice for personal use and a great choice for corporate use. No other phone operating system on the market was designed and developed with this specific outcome planned and built in from day one.
The iPhone is very much a personal use phone and has little to nil attraction to corporate IT departments as a useful corporate tool. At this point the undisputed KING here is Research In Motion’s (RIM) Blackberry. I work in the corporate zone and all corporate IT departments that I know of either stipulate or mandate the Blackberry.
Microsoft are hoping that they have done enough with Phone 7 for IT departments to consider blessing it for corporate use and connectivity. It has awesome integration to the number one corporate mail client: Outlook. It has great integration to SharePoint (an engine used by businesses for applications). And it has the top three corporate-use computer tools provided on every phone: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
At the same time, even with all this attention to corporate requirements and use, Microsoft have worked hard to make the phone fun and exciting for personal use. As an example of this Microsoft are claiming that the specifications they provided to their hardware partners ensure that the in-phone camera is a top performer. At the launch event it was claimed that no other phone can be armed for and take a picture in less time than a phone 7 phone. Also that the image quality of a phone 7 photograph is the best quality that a mobile phone camera system can currently provide, and Ballmer (Microsoft’s CEO) even said that image quality is better than that possible with an iPhone 4. That is a bold claim.
As well there is the very slick Facebook integration and it has access to music, videos (TV and movies), and games (via Xbox Live).
So it is going to be very interesting to watch what happens now.
Did Microsoft get the mix right? Will Phone 7 be a hit with personal users and corporate IT department for business use? Can the one phone satisfy both types of use? If it does then Microsoft will be back in the game for sure: big time.
