Windows Phone 7 problems: account management and music playback

Windows Phone is a great smartphone platform and even in it's first release does quite a few things better than the competition, but things are not perfect by a long way. My previous reviews have already mentioned a couple of issues, but I want to go into some more detail on two big problems I'm experiencing at the moment.

Microsoft's account management hell

This is a much wider issue than the Windows Phone platform but is something that must be affecting a fair few users of multiple Microsoft products and services. By continually throwing out new platforms like Live and Zune on top of existing services like Hotmail and Xbox Live, Microsoft has created an account management nightmare which manifests itself in a particularly frustrating way on the Windows Phone.

When I first set my phone up I let it create a new Windows Live ID for me. I had a long-dead Hotmail email account, and an Xbox Live ID I use on my 360 linked to an old Yahoo email address, but as I was choosing to invest in a new platform I thought it best to start over with a nice new live.co.uk identity.

What a mistake that turned out to be. A new Xbox Live account was automatically created for me and linked to my new Windows Live ID. This meant my real avatar and achievements off my Xbox Live account wouldn't appear on the phone, and there was no option to switch gamer tags as you get with the Xbox 360 itself.

Over the next few weeks I researched numerous discussion areas on the web to find a way to sort this mess out, but it is presently unfixable. The only option is to reset the phone and set it up again using the Xbox Live account, but doing this completely wipes the phone including any purchased media and apps. I'd been putting this off as it sounded like torture but earlier this week I took the plunge. Fortunately, with almost all my personal information being stored in the cloud I didn't have any issues with reloading data, and the music I'd purchased was non-DRM'd so that could be copied back across from the synced copy on my PC. But paid-for apps are a different story.

When I completed setting up my phone it the Marketplace wanted me to pay again for apps I'd already purchased. I phoned Zune support (0203 450 5855) and asked nicely that they transfer two key purchases across for me - Wonder Reader and Rise of Glory. My other purchases turned out to be apps I didn't really use so wasn't that bothered about them. Zune declined my polite request and refused to offer me any help at all. They said that it was not possible to transfer purchases between accounts - but they also declined to credit me for the apps so I could download them again.

To be fair, the representative I spoke to did apologise for the less-than-ideal situation, but it rings hollow when they won't do anything to resolve it. Zune's response is that I do have access to them if I re-wipe my phone and use the other account - but of course then I'd lose my Xbox live integration again.

Microsoft does not provide any tools for managing/merging accounts and I had no choice but to switch my phone over to the Xbox Live account - this is actually their recommendation although they skirt around the fact that users will have items they've paid for taken away from them.

Once more we get screwed over despite choosing to pay for goods rather than pirate them for free. If I'd jailbroken my phone using the Chevron unlock tool it would allow me to install any app I could get hold of for free.

Microsoft desperately need to provide a web-based tool to handle the tangled account structure across their messed-up ecosystem. They should also credit me the £4.48 that I've spent on apps I can no longer access - fuckers!!!

Zune music player

Firstly some good news to report - the sound quality of music via my htc HD7 and Sennheiser CX-300 earphones is excellent. It blows my iPod Classic 120Gb and iPhone 3G out of the water - mainly due to the worsening sound quality of Apple products in recent years - the first generation Nano sounded much better than my current devices.

The hub interface of the media player is a different story though. As with other WP7 apps it makes use of the panorama control to show a six-screen wide application surface. The problem is that what the panorama shows is almost entirely rubbish.

The first screen is just a history page with an oversized icon of the last item played. The next screen is more history. Then you get two pages of "new" items which is really pointless. The fifth screen is an oddly-titled marquee which shows links to other media items you can play from other installed apps. Finally the sixth screen shows the menu of music, videos and podcasts you wanted in the first place. Eventually you learn to work around this by scrolling left rather than right when the app loads up.

Things also start to go wrong when you browse music. In general I like the cut-off text used across the Windows Phone interface - it's a clever indication that there's more content off the screen. But when it's a track title and you have no way of reading the hidden part it's just dumb. The Marketplace displays track titles in exactly the same way so in some situations it can be a pain to work out whether the songs you're looking at are the ones you actually want to buy.

To make matters worse, track lengths are not displayed anywhere within the player or the Marketplace. I  wanted to buy a movie soundtrack the other day but was wary of ending up with a bunch of 30-second long ditties, so I had to resort to viewing the album on Amazon to see the track lengths. An essential requirement of the Marketplace (or indeed any e-commerce site/app) is to not make it difficult to spend the money I want to spend.

Overall, the Zune music player needs to be more application-like rather than the content-optimised interface it currently uses. Although it flies in the face of the Windows Phone user interface guidelines there desparetely needs to be some more navigation options like a breadcrumb to help with moving easily through the hierarchy of artists and albums.

Maybe if the hardware back button worked on an application level rather than wreaking confusion by trying to function globally it wouldn't be as bad. When task switching back to the music player from another app it can be bewildering to work out how to move upwards from a song to pick a different album or artist.

A contradiction with the Zune player is that many of it's problems stem from the stylistic use of over-large text - yet when a track is playing the list of other tracks in the album is pitifully small and easily missed - and once again there's no track lengths.

A very nice part of the aesthetics of the player are the background images that are automatically displayed for artists. This is a great idea but is hopelessly unreliable - only one song in my collection has this content working and it seems impossible to figure out what is wrong (see nine page XDA discussion thread).

On a brighter note...

Now that my Xbox Live integration is working properly it's a treat to see my real avatar and achievements displayed in the phone, plus gamer points on phone games now count towards my total. If only the thousands of gamer points from my offline Xbox account could be merged into my online account - but that's yet another account management gotcha I've fallen foul of.

It's possible the music player issues can be worked around with an third party player if any arrive in the Marketplace - either that or we'll have to hope that Microsoft rewrites the built-in player in a future release, because it needs more than just a few simple tweaks. It's just doesn't do the basics of music playback well enough.

Windows Phone 7 one month on - followup review

A month has flown by since I got my hands on a htc HD7 running the new Windows Phone 7 OS so I thought it was time to write up my thoughts now that the dust has settled and the honeymoon period is over.

Highlights

The phone is still fresh, fun and very cool to use - my previous review already described how clean, modern and original the user interface is and everyone who's seen the phone in action has been impressed - including long-time iPhone fans. When the OS was launched in November and screen shots appeared everywhere I must admit I didn't really 'get' it - the system looks so different from any other platform and very minimalist. It was only when I had a play with a demo unit that suddenly it started to look very interesting. Animation and navigation are such an important part of the experience. Even Microsoft's marketing department seemed to struggle to figure it out and sold it on the ridiculous premise that the slickness of Windows Phone 7 would get your tasks done quicker so you'd use your phone less and get on with your life. Selling a product by describing it as something you wouldn't want or need to use very much seems a bit stupid. It's taken a fan called Brandon Foy to show them how it's done - watch this Youtube clip.

Early adopter smugness - when the original iPhone launched I thought it was a spectacular piece of technology but for various reasons I didn't buy one, and later lived to regret it. With WP7 the timing was perfect - my contract ended and the OS had been on the market less than three months. 2011 is looking full of promise with the Microsoft presentations at MWC in Barcelona featuring live demonstrations of upcoming features - no vapour-ware here. By the end of the year copy/paste and well-designed multitasking will be delivered making the platform fully competitive in all areas.

Shiny new applications - WP7 benefits from having fresh new versions of mobile applications like Facebook, IMDB, Amazon and Shazam. They usually have more sophisticated and modern interfaces than the iOS and Android equivalents which in many cases haven't seen any real development in a few years. It sounds bizarre to say that applications on a Microsoft platform do a better job of getting out the way and presenting the actual content than their Apple equivalents, but in a lot of cases it's true.

Zune desktop software - this is excellent to use and works very well. As with the phone itself the user interface is very stylish and clear, and the basic operations work well. Microsoft seem to have tried very hard to out-do the much-criticised iTunes and visually I think they've succeeded although feature-wise it's hard to find much in the way of differentiation, apart from Zune's wireless sync ability.

Social networking integration - the phone has actually got me using Facebook again, although I feel like I've been coerced! I am not a lover of Facebook, mainly due to privacy concerns and a mistrust of the company itself. But when Facebook is so well integrated into the phone it's a much more tempting proposition. You can post on someone's Facebook wall directly from their contact page, and status updates are easily done from the "Me" tile on the home page. I've recently added a tile for my wife to the home page and that works a treat as well, allowing me to quickly access all her contact details without having to go and find her in the people hub. Twitter integration is now confirmed for the major "Mango" update later this year which is a very exciting prospect.

Criticisms

Reliability - the core OS seems very stable but there have been a few glitches. The Marketplace application is my biggest annoyance because it's very prone to crashing and when it does fall over it manages it in a way that prevents it from working again until the phone is rebooted. This is not the kind of experience you expect especially when trying to buy stuff. Also, I have seen occasional nasty screen corruption on my device forcing a reboot. This looks like a firmware issue and I suspect it's specific to the HD7 because it's not been widely reported elsewhere.

Back button navigation - to ensure the user interface remains clear and uncluttered there is no onscreen back button in any apps - they rely on the hardware button. This is fine except when the button tries to fulfil the dual roles of moving back through phone application screens and also acting as a browser back button in the web browser. Imagine you're in an app with an embedded browser and you navigate a few links then hit the Start button to return to the home screen. Then hit the back button to return to the app. You can't then use the back button to go back in the history of the embedded browser window, because the back button will take you back to the Start page. This has caught me out a couple of times and there appears to be no easy solution, except to say that browser-type applications (including Internet Explorer) should really be given their own software navigation buttons, and the phone's hardware back button should be reserved for navigating between application screens. The problem is that a precedent has already been set and I doubt Microsoft will be willing to change it.

Super secret hidden menus - on a few occasions I've been frustrated by being unable to find an option only to find out it's hidden behind a press-and-hold menu. A classic example was when the pictures hub on the home screen was showing a picture I didn't like. I assumed it was random and would change eventually but it didn't. I looked everywhere to find an option to change it but couldn't figure it out. Eventually after searching on the web I realised you can press-and-hold the background of the picture hub (not the tile itself!) and a 'Change Background' option appears. I'm not convinced by these menus because in many situations you just don't know they're there. In some of the messaging applications common commands that should be on the application bar are also hidden in these menus.

Third party application performance - a few marketplace apps I've tried can be sluggish and have a choppy user interface. Twitter clients in particular seem to cause issues for developers, including in the official app. Interestingly the phone's default built-in apps like the People hub have no such issues which raises a question of whether Microsoft have developed them natively rather than in Silverlight and .NET like the Marketplace apps. Either that or only Microsoft has the knowledge and skills to make applications smooth and fluid at the moment.

Gaming performance - the hardware itself has more than enough power to run current mobile games well and 3D games can look very impressive, but 2D games I've tried have been less smooth than expected. It appears that Microsoft has limited games to running at 30 frames per second to preserve battery life. A well intentioned move and sensible for 3D titles but 2D games don't look as smooth as they do on recent iOS devices that can push closer to 60fps. This is something that Microsoft need to look into, preferably before Angry Birds is released.

The Harvest, one of the best looking Windows Phone games

Gaming titles - while the Xbox integration offers great potential I've not been very impressed so far with available games. Angry Birds has been promised for the next month or so but nothing so far - in fact the delay has prompted an indie developer to write a very similar title called Chicks'n'Vixens - which he apparently completed in a week. Other titles I've tried have seemed passable but there is often an issue with the price. The Harvest is £5.49 which is a bit excessive for a fledgling platform even if it is a premium title - but it is well worth downloading the demo to see it running. I've recently discovered a flight simulator with some great dogfighting action called Rise of Glory which has improved matters somewhat.

Marketplace app pricing - as an iPhone user I was used to being pleasantly surprised by the price of applications but this is rarely the case on WP7. Hopefully it's a reflection of the smaller market and range of applications rather than greed, eventually greater competition should bring prices down if the forces of capitalism do their job properly. There's far less really great free stuff for WP7 at the moment and non-free apps are often more expensive than I would expect. Developers should think about pricing cheaply and going for market share while it's early days - a great app at a great price could easily become the platform standard at this stage in the game.

Summary

My overall satisfaction level remains very high and should do so for the foreseeable future with the upgrades to look forward to later this year. Since starting this review I've installed an update Microsoft have made available - the installer upgrade which doesn't offer any new features but reassured me that the update process works smoothly. Reports in the media about problems with this package usually fail to mention it only affected one Samsung device running a specific firmware version.

The only frustration is having the patience to wait for the OS updates to roll in, and for developers to release some really compelling games. But it's important to remember how great the base platform is, and that even though WP7's market share is small at the moment, Microsoft is really working hard on this product and is in it for the long run.

Windows Phone 7 OS initial review on htc HD7

Last week I was faced with having to decide whether to replace my iPhone 3G with an iPhone 4, or try and live with something else for the next 18 months. I didn't really consider an Android phone for a number of reasons but despite a lot of initial scepticism I had become very interested in the new Windows Phone 7 platform. Conventional wisdom says that you should never buy a 1.0 release of anything by Microsoft, but then WP7 is not a conventional Microsoft product. It's a total rethink of their mobile operating system strategy, which they desperately needed in light of the crushing defeat Windows Mobile 6 has been dealt by iOS and Android devices. Rather than clone what the competition have done, WP7 includes a lot of original thinking and some genuine innovations.

Decisions...

After deliberating for almost a week, I still couldn't resist the temptation of the new and unique experience of using a WP7 phone. It was a classic head vs. heart decision, where common sense told me to get the iPhone 4 for it's great build quality, stunning screen and superb performance. When I first got my 3G I loved it, but the iOS4-on-3G upgrade mess really annoyed me and I just felt that the iPhone 4 was only a small evolutionary step forward from the 3G. It was going to work in exactly the same way and run the same apps.

In contrast, WP7 has some really neat tricks up it's sleeve such as deep social networking integration, live tile updates on the main screen and the beautiful Metro user interface. Providing it can get a decent foothold in the market place, it has massive potential over the next few years if Microsoft keep up the same level of effort as they've put into the initial release. To top it off, the htc HD7 handset I was considering has a huge 4.3in screen that was very appealing for reading web pages and consuming all the other content I view on my phone these days.

I finally made my decision on Friday and signed up for the HD7. The monthly cost was the same as the iPhone 4, but there was an up-front saving to be made of around £140 on the handset cost - the HD7 was free. After owning the phone for a couple of days I thought it would be an idea to write up a quick review that covers a few key experiences so far...

The overall experience of using the phone is outstanding - the interface is slick, amazingly responsive and it always looks beautiful. You can choose an accent colour and a background colour of either light (white) or dark (black). The dark option with white text on a black background looks absolutely stunning, although in a brightly lit environment like the office you see a lot of reflections and fingerprints. The light option solves this problem while still looking very nice. I would like to try and find a third party app that switches this preference on a timer so that in work hours it's light, and outside of that it uses the dark scheme. One feature I like is that while many apps follow your theme preferences, some override it and choose the setting which best suits the content they will be displaying. For example, Office and Mail always use a light theme, while the media hub is always dark to show photographs off to best effect.

Setup was incredibly simple and automatically took care of importing a lot of my data - I added my Google and Facebook accounts to the phone via an amazingly simple page that asked for email address and password only. It then automatically determined that it would sync mail and contacts with Google, and contacts and status updates with Facebook. As soon as these accounts were configured, the phone automatically built the People Hub and the phone was awash with content. It cleverly links contact details together and shows everything it possibly can for contacts. Many entries in my address book now have a photo stored against them (from Facebook), combined with email and phone numbers from Google Contacts. The people hub scrapes up new photographs and status updates and displays them intelligently. There is also a Me tile which shows your own status updates and responses. It's actually possible to use Facebook directly from the built in features of the phone, although there is stand-alone application available too.

Text entry - the onscreen keyboard is top notch and in my opinion betters iOS, although the 4.3" screen on my device is perhaps an unfair advantage. The layout is  clear and uncluttered, and the prediction options are much more frictionless than the iOS equivalents. Above the keyboard is a word suggestion area that serves two purposes - it is populated with suggestions after you've typed a few letters to offer an auto-complete facility that can save you from typing the whole word. In this mode it never tries to forcefully replace what you've typed (unlike iOS), but if you do mistype an obvious word the area usually contains the corrected word in bold to indicate that it will automatically replace what you've typed. It's seems to calculate a confidence factor and only actively fixes what you've typed when it's convinced you've typed something wrong. Clever.

Web browsing - although the reviews I read generally rated WP7 Internet Explorer highly, I was disappointed with page load times which are sluggish compared to mobile Safari. The overall load time might be similar but it takes a lot longer for anything to appear in IE - you stare at a blank page for a lot longer. Safari also does a better job of rendering zoomed-out pages - unreadable small text is nicely blurred and looks better to me than the blockier rendering of IE. I've also noticed font size issues on a few web sites which rendered perfectly on iOS Safari, so WP7 IE doesn't quite offer the perfect desktop-quality browsing experience you get on iPhones. In most other respects the browser is very good - tap to zoom and pinch to zoom are both available and must use serious hardware graphics acceleration because they are very fast and smooth. Tab handling is also excellent and the browser will load multiple tabs with content in parallel!

Search facilities - this is my first major annoyance with WP7. When you hit the search button on the home screen, it loads a superb native Bing application. Although mentally conditioned to use Google I was more than happy with using this app because it displays web searches, news and local search results on separate filtered areas and the presentation is very nice indeed. So when I clicked the search button inside Internet Explorer I expected a similar experience - but this is not what happens. It doesn't load Bing, nor does it load Google for that matter. It loads a disgusting mobile Yahoo page inside the browser. Apparently Microsoft left the choice of search provider inside the browser as a customisable option, and my mobile carrier (O2 UK) set it to Yahoo. This needs fixing desperately, or at least an option must be provided to change it. Microsoft should do themselves and their users a favour and integrate the Bing search into the browser. Apple have found a way to sell mobiles without allowing operators to change things like this so it isn't impossible.

Zune media player - in general, media playback works very well. I was delighted to find that it will natively play AAC files so I could use the PC Zune software to copy music from my iTunes library over to the device and they play perfectly. In fact on my HD7 handset the sound quality is noticeably better than my iPhone 3G. I was also delighted to find that after importing a couple of Joy Division albums, they were presented against a lovely background of a black and white picture of the band, probably taken by the great Anton Corbijn. The image isn't album art - the system must have grabbed it from the Zune Marketplace based on the artist name.

Messaging - this is one area where the phone is remarkably similar to iOS, with messages organised by conversation rather than date, and displayed in a conversation format using speech bubbles. It's nice to see MMS pictures inside the speech bubble of the message rather than in two separate bubbles like iOS though.

Youtube - currently a complete mess on WP7. There is an official Microsoft application which plays videos when invoked from links on web pages - although I've seen reports that it doesn't always work. But more seriously, if you launch the app stand-alone it doesn't have a native interface, it just uses an embedded browser window and displays the mobile version of the standard Youtube site. As you can imagine, this looks really poor. There is an htc Youtube app which has a nice front-end but it has to be installed alongside the MS application because you need that installed to play video embedded in web pages. There are a few third party applications but none of the ones I've seen so far allow you to log in and view your favourites.

Office - the built in office application lets you create, view and edit Word and Excel files directly on your device. The editors are simplistic but get the job done fairly well, although I haven't tried editing complex documents created on a PC. There is a Powerpoint viewer but presentations cannot be edited, which seems like a sensible decision for small devices like phones.

Third party applications - the marketplace is filling up rapidly with applications and many big players such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon Kindle, eBay, IMDB are already present, sometimes with a few third party alternatives as well. The official Twitter client is weak because it doesn't update it's live tile on the start page, but an app called Beezz is much better and does implement this. The IMDB app in particular deserves special mention for looking gorgeous, it's currently using stylised faded-out stills from the film Inception as a background and looks very smart.

Marketplace - Microsoft has taken a different approach to Apple and there is no separate music/video and app store - everything goes through the marketplace application. The search engine returns results from all three areas which is a nice idea but fails miserably in practice. Search for "Amazon" to try and find their apps and you get dozens of songs with that work in their title. There are ways round it but they're not obvious. Another bugbear is that the marketplace application is buggy and prone to crashing, but this is made into a much bigger issue because it seems to mess up it's state and therefore won't restart until the phone is rebooted. Fix this NOW Microsoft!

Email - the email client is simple and elegant, displaying information in a fuss free manner. It does most of what you need although I was annoyed to find there are no settings to fine tune loading of images inside messages. Also, HTML formatted messages are initially displayed zoomed in which I'm not convinced is correct, on messages with complex formatting it's better to show a zoomed out view and let the user decide which area they want to read.

Camera - the camera application and photo hub work well and are automatically populated with any Facebook or Windows Live pictures you have. It has been well covered elsewhere that the camera application doesn't remember it's configuration settings such as whether the flash has been disabled, which is pretty miserable and hopefully one of the first priority issues Microsoft will address.

Closing thoughts

My overall first experiences of Windows Phone 7 are very positive, and other people I've shown it to have also been impressed. It's fresh, modern and very powerful, and absolutely moves the smartphone game on from the competition. Yes, there are some important features lacking, but ridiculing the lack of copy and paste  - as half of the internet seems to have done - is a bit harsh considering the massive amount of functionality that has been delivered in the initial release. And the exciting part is that things can only get better.

In general the htc HD7 handset itself is very good although not perfect - my thoughts on this will be in a future review because I wanted to focus on the new operating system this time round.

Windows Phone 7 - feeling a little bit sorry for Microsoft

In this post I take a look at how Microsoft are in an unfamiliar position with Windows Phone 7, given their history of releasing products where success was almost guaranteed.

Google? Apple? They are the Diet-Coke of evil!

People who call Google or Apple evil really need to look a bit further back in history. Microsoft’s activities in the late 80’s and 1990’s are way in excess of any bad behaviour we see from today’s big IT players. Look at how they deliberately broke Windows 3.1 on DR-DOS - generating lots of bad press and Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt against a perfectly good product. Not to mention how they paid very special attention to the German PC OS market where DR-DOS was selling really well. Within 12 months they wiped DR-DOS out of the German market by a series of tricks including heavily incentivising PC manufacturers to make sure they switched to pre-installing Microsoft operating systems. The subsequent integration of MS-DOS 7.0 and Windows 95 made sure DR-DOS was finally buried under six feet of earth, even though Digital Research were able to demonstrate Windows 95 just fine on top of DR-DOS.

It’s a rule of thumb that Microsoft doesn’t deliver the best products in a given market, but uses pushy business practices and the power of their existing monopoly to ensure success, often at the expense of more innovative competitors. This usually happens while they make a point of telling everybody how innovative they are.

Smartphones

The mobile phone market played out in a similar way, with Microsoft using their Windows brand recognition to become the dominant player in the smartphone segment. But when the iPhone arrived in 2007 it caused massive disruption, making it glaringly obvious that Windows Mobile had seen little change in five years and was hopelessly dated. The user interface of the iPhone had been written from scratch to work with a touch screen, and was designed to be used with fingers rather than a stylus. It was a game changer and is the kind of technology where everyone remembers the first time they saw it and used it.

Fast forward to the present day and the iPhone has been around long enough to have lost the initial wow factor, and since it was released the user interface has changed very little. The home screen is still an elegant but simplistic grid of icons that launch programs, reminiscent of the style used by the Windows 3.1 Program Manager.

Windows Phone 7

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been hard at work responding to the iPhone and has released Windows Phone 7. It's a complete break from the older Windows Mobile product line and incorporates a spectacular new user interface. Rather than mimic the iPhone or Android, it has a completely original style with some genuine innovations. At first it seems simplistic, with all “chrome” removed in favour of large slabs of primary colour and plain text instead of buttons and icons. It really needs to be seen working to be fully appreciated, where the fluid animations and general feeling of flair and simplicity become apparent. WP7’s solution to the problem of restrictive screen size on mobiles is genius –applications are intentionally designed to be bigger than the screen, and the phone acts like a sliding window onto the application. You swipe left and right to move through various pages, instead of the hierarchical approach of iOS where you can end up three or four levels deep in settings pages.

WP7 is all about the software and the experience of using it. The sheer originality and innovation in the user interface really does bring a wow factor to WP7, just like we got with the iPhone at launch. In fact WP7 makes the iPhone look a little dated - it is now Apple on the back foot who need to do something bigger than an incremental update with their next iOS release.

It’s not often that this happens, but Microsoft has the best product on the market at the moment. And this time round they haven’t imitated or bought out their competitors, or used excessive marketing muscle - they've competed on merit and done a great job of it. In spite of this, the success of WP7 is by no means guaranteed – in fact the odds are stacked against it. iPhone and Android have a large installed user base and huge application libraries, while the WP7 app library is severely lacking. To make matters worse, many customers already have a smartphone and moving from one phone platform to another isn't a step to be taken lightly because it can involve repurchasing paid applications and possibly difficult data migration.

Taking the plunge...

In spite of the inconvenience of switching platforms I'm intrigued and seriously tempted to migrate to a WP7 device. My contract is nearly up and my 3G iPhone feels long in the tooth, even though it remained on sale for nearly twelve months after I bought it. I felt badly let down as a 3G owner by the iOS 4 upgrade, which had all the compelling new features disabled, yet performs so poorly that it's horrible to use. Meanwhile some app store developers are getting lazy and releasing iOS-4-only applications regardless of whether they actually need features specific to the newer OS. I don’t like having my arm twisted to upgrade in this way – especially when still under contract.

Microsoft's operating system strategy - this must be wrong?

Word on tech street this week is that Microsoft is looking to make a significant change with the next release  of Windows and make it available on the ARM processor architecture as well as x86/x64. The original Bloomberg story hints that this is so that Windows can get a foothold in the tablet computer market. I hope they’re wrong.

Windows (the one based on NT, not CE) is a desktop operating system. Unfortunately for Microsoft, they cannot pull off the same trick as Apple has achieved with OS X – to reskin the user interface of their desktop operating system to work on mobile devices. This is because Windows wasn’t written to ever support that, and it’s codebase makes it difficult to achieve. Even if it was possible, is there really much point? The main reason for doing it would be to take advantage of the vast library of existing applications for the platform, but these haven’t been designed for mobile/tablet devices either and are going to be clunky to use.

The only chance of success I can see with an ARM-based version of Windows is in the netbook segment. These devices usually have traditional keyboards and pointing devices which is the only effective way to use Windows. Having said that, it's not going to be the biggest of markets - tablets are where it's at thanks to the iPad.

Can it not be this simple?

The variations of Windows CE are a different story. Windows Phone 7 looks like an excellent system – it has a user interface that makes the iPhone look dated in a number of areas. They did the right thing with this OS – break with the past and backwards compatibility and start again. It might still become a failure but that will be due to being massively late to market compared to Android and iOS, rather than because of any failure in the product itself.

Tablet computing represents a real opportunity for Microsoft. The market is younger and less established than with smartphones, and although the iPad has an significant early lead at the premium end there’s still a huge opportunity in the mainstream segment. Competition is already building up in the shape of Android tablets, so they need to act quickly.

Microsoft’s best bet for success with tablet computing is not Windows. They should use Windows Phone 7 as a starting point and produce a real tablet computer OS. Earlier this year it looked like this was going to happen with a bizarrely named OS called “Windows Embedded Compact 7”, a variant of Windows Phone 7. The system was even demonstrated on an Asus tablet and looked very promising, but even more bizarrely Asus has now dropped it in favour of Android.

Windows Embedded Compact 7, apparently

Whatever Microsoft does next – and it’s rumoured they’ll be telling us at CES, they need to do two things. Firstly, announce something that actually does the job and does it well – they have shown they can do this with WP7. Secondly, whatever they present must be shipping or guaranteed to ship very soon. People are sick of their vapourware, and it’s a pointless tactic when there’s viable solutions such as Android out there.

Android 3.0 is now rumoured to ship in March, and a revised iPad is expected in February so time is running out