Windows Phone Series 7 Announced, Makes me Feel Weird Inside
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
I couldn’t go a whole day without jotting down some thoughts about the bomb dropped on the tech industry yesterday by the mobile team at Microsoft.
Microsoft yesterday unveiled the latest version of Windows Mobile – or should I say, Windows Phone – named, in typical confusing Microsoft product versioning fashion, Windows Phone 7 Series. With the exception of the needlessly verbose name, Windows Mobile 7 (as I shall henceforth be referring to it as) is a complete U-turn by the Windows Mobile team, which is a very good thing. The total tear-down and rebuild of Windows Mobile as we know it coupled with the team clearly going straight back to the roots of user experience design together comes together to make a smartphone OS from Microsoft that is actually worth a damn. No more are the days where mobile phones are likened to just ‘pocket PCs’, a time which Windows Mobile 6.x incorrectly suggested Microsoft was hoping to hold on to and – although The Register detracts with it’s trademark cynicism, missing the point entirely – that’s a very exciting thing.
When I say ‘tear-down’, I mean it. Every parallel to the desktop OS experience Microsoft had retained in Windows Mobile is completely gone, bringing about an entirely new focus on the user. Let’s talk about what I consider the 3 most important new aspects of Windows Mobile 7, shall we?
User Experience
Two acronyms that today, mean more than ever; UI and UX. When presented with a Windows Mobile 7 device, you’ll no longer be greeted by a conglomeration of icons, chrome, start buttons and task managers but a much plainer grid layout of tiles each representing a distinct function of your phone. These harken back to the very basics of system design you learn during the first few weeks at school; separate your problem into different, distinct entities. In this case photos, people, messages, games, entertainment and me are the actionable and reasonably fuzzy groups of items (known as ‘hubs’) you expect to be interacting with on your phone – each displaying live data on the home screen, allowing brief consumption at a glance.
The UI throughout the OS is relatively uniform and will remind one of the experience found on the Zune devices. There’s very little chrome found anywhere; just clean typography very fitting of the 3” display. It is, however, a very unique and quirky look that instills a bit of worry. Very little has been said on the potential for developers on this platform, and I don’t think much more information will appear between now and Microsoft’s MIX conference, but this kind of intricate UI philosophy doesn’t seem like something developers are going to willingly follow. I think this is likely to bring about lots of inconsistencies between interacting with the OS’s shell and 3rd party applications – especially the more information-centric of apps – which isn’t a deal-breaker, but will certainly interrupt what you’re used to on the phone which is never good.
Because of these radical changes, though, nay-sayers (including the Reg article linked above) have been scolding Microsoft for no longer offering “a pocket computer that happens to be able to make phone calls” and for pandering to the general population – who apparently are little more than jackdaws that flock to shiny objects and care little for actual productivity. Thanks for that.
Ubiquitous, Contextual Search
One huge plus of Windows Mobile 7 is the integration of search (both local and online through Bing), the experience of which can be best described as the iPhone’s Spotlight on crack. Or perhaps some less nasty yet totally awesome narcotic; it’s like Spotlight on pancakes1.
Microsoft are enforcing some pretty strict requirements on OEMs in order to support Windows Mobile 7 and one of these requirements is an always-accessible “search” button which, when depressed, will provide the user with a search interface tailored to whatever they happened to be doing at that time. If the user is currently looking at a very specific set of information, for example their address book, a quick tap of the search button will allow them to filter their list of contacts based on names, locations, and such-like. If the user’s current focus is on something more broad, like their homescreen, the search context will be much wider, pulling results from all over the phone as well as the Internet – also giving the user the opportunity to categorically split these results (local geo-specific results, phonebook entries, messages, etc.) with a swipe of the finger.
The constant availability of an intelligent search function also serves as a very viable ‘panic’ button for when you just want to get to a certain item.
Like pancakes, I tell you!
Xbox Live and Connectivity
Ok, I’ll admit it, the Xbox Live integration doesn’t actually sound too ground-breaking to me and I could totally have done without it (although, on that note, more information on this will apparently also be released at the MIX conference) but the interplay and further connectivity to your friends it represents really drives home the idea that Microsoft are all about ‘the social’ on this platform. Your ‘people hub’ will be linked with Facebook2, displaying statuses on your home screen and allowing you to update yourself; your ‘photos’ hub will be hooked into online services; the phone will be a fully functional Zune, with all the social features that come with it and a pretty impressive (yet lightly documented) Office suite will extend the reach of this platform into the enterprise – not that Microsoft have ever had any trouble doing that.
There is of course much more to Windows Mobile 7, and I advise you to read all the coverage you can to get a better picture of what Microsoft’s latest and greatest iteration is all about because trust me, there’s a lot to take in.
Although I haven’t played with the only Windows Mobile 7 device that seems to exist, I believe these things I’ve highlighted all work together to create a very ‘connected’ feel and experience – unlike the iPhone and to a lesser extent anything running Android – and there’s a certain, important dynamicity to be achieved by making the user like feel his or her device is always keeping them up-to-date with what’s going on with their friends and the world around them.. These are the things that will, through taking user experience to the next level, set an expectation for 2010. Announcing Windows Mobile 7 a full 10 months before the first device will actually appear on the market was no doubt a very bad decision for Microsoft, it gives the other major players ample time to up their game – as well as more criteria on which we differentiate smartphone platforms.
A phone is all about communication and socialising and Microsoft are, on top of this, agreeing with something we’ve all started to accept as a truth – communication using your phone isn’t just done by a voice call any more.
1 Where I’m from, a country that has a national celebration based around pancakes, they absolutely are a narcotic.
2 And I assume other social networks, perhaps Twitter, but I’m not sure.
Oh, and as a side note: Windows Mobile 7 will not support Flash at launch. There seems to be very little enthusiasm from the Microsoft camp for supporting flash, but no outright objection either – the right approach to that issue, I think.
Also, no multitasking. But of course, no-one seems to be talking about that, even though that’s an even bigger shock than finding the iPhone’s incapability to do it because that’s something even WinMo 6 could do. That’s something I believe I will cover in a different blog post entirely…
