Windows Phone 7 Needs Four Things to Succeed

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Microsoft will be launching Windows Phone 7 towards the end of the year and will be facing some tough competition in the smartphone market. To survive, Microsoft is going to have to be superior in four areas to grab a share of the market.

Windows Phone 7's approach to the smartphone user interface differs from competitors such as the iPhone, which offers screens of individual applications arranged in a gridlike pattern; Microsoft chose to instead consolidate Web content and applications into subject-specific "Hubs" such as "Office" or "Games." The smartphones will be paired with a new Windows Phone Marketplace, where developers will be able to submit five free applications (rising to $19.99 after that) along with an unlimited number of paid applications.
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What Phone 7 really needs.

#1 Community support. One of the greatest things about Windows Mobile and Android is how many custom roms for phones out there. People love to hack their phones, so make it easy for them to do so.

#2 SD card slot. I'm serious.

#3 Keep all the old functionality of Windows Mobile, like copy and paste.

#4 Allow for customization. Android has a plethora of UI custimization, like Sense UI and Live Wallpapers. Nobody likes the one UI fits all method, like Apple has.
 
Ashbringer said:
What Phone 7 really needs.

#1 Community support. One of the greatest things about Windows Mobile and Android is how many custom roms for phones out there. People love to hack their phones, so make it easy for them to do so.

#2 SD card slot. I'm serious.

#3 Keep all the old functionality of Windows Mobile, like copy and paste.

#4 Allow for customization. Android has a plethora of UI custimization, like Sense UI and Live Wallpapers. Nobody likes the one UI fits all method, like Apple has.
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# Multitasking

p.s. still on Windows Mobile 6.1 here due to Outlook integration (onenote, and other things)
 
I will say this, I’ve been getting up to speed on the development tools and they are simply awesome, Microsoft simply knocked out a home run here, it’s pretty much a developer’s wet dream. It's not dissimilar to the dev tools for Windows Mobile 6.x but the fit and finish is excellent and there are templates for just about everything. It's all Silverlight and .NET so if you these tools already then have the skill set to develop for Win 7 Phones RIGHT NOW! Also a nice little touch, the emulator is multi-touch enabled for Tablet PCs! So even without a phone you can pretty much get the entire look and feel of your app nailed down in the emulator, which BTW is MUCH faster than the old 6.x one. The web browser even works on it. It’s a trip using the IE web browser in the emulator with multi-touch.

The base versions of the tools are free so not cost there but they don’t work on XP. If you’re a .NET developer and haven’t gotten into Silverlight this is a good chance. Even if you don’t plan on releasing an app (I’ve got a couple in the works that I hope to have done by the end of the year) for this phone this is great way to get into Sliverlight and WPF which are the future of Windows client GUI development. And boy is it powerful stuff but it does take a little time to get used to because it a much different GUI tool than you’d be used to in .NET Window Forms or even unmanaged code GUI development.

Get started here: http://developer.windowsphone.com/windows-phone-7/ . If you like to just write code this stuff is really fun and cool no matter what.

If the phones are half as good as these development tools Win 7 Phone will do fine.
 
The article is split into two pages. Here are their "Four Things":
  1. Quality
  2. Applications Store
  3. OEMs on Board
  4. Apple, Android problems
Ashbringer said:
What Phone 7 really needs.

#1 Community support. One of the greatest things about Windows Mobile and Android is how many custom roms for phones out there. People love to hack their phones, so make it easy for them to do so.

#2 SD card slot. I'm serious.

#3 Keep all the old functionality of Windows Mobile, like copy and paste.

#4 Allow for customization. Android has a plethora of UI custimization, like Sense UI and Live Wallpapers. Nobody likes the one UI fits all method, like Apple has.
Click to expand...
1 and 4 are related, but yeah, this would be needed to compete with Android.
2 doesn't have a chance--Microsoft is betting the farm on Cloud.
3 Backward compatibility is always nice... as long as old UI functions aren't a barrier to iPhone/Android/Blackberry user adoption.

cliche said:
# Multitasking

p.s. still on Windows Mobile 6.1 here due to Outlook integration (onenote, and other things)
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I have read that multitasking is a bit gimped, but it should be at least on par with iPhone and Android.

Integration is HUGE if they really want to compete against Blackberry.
 
If MS was smart here is what they should do

1) Unified hardware platform. Amazing things can happen when you have a unified hardware platform, namely the software that's created for it, but also other things. If they would release a yearly hardware update (not unlike the iphone) with versions for all carriers, then it would suddenly become "The Windows Phone" instead of "a windows phone".

2) Make sure the UI is intuitive, snappy, and smooth. You can cram all the hardware you want into a phone, but if the UI is crap, then what you have is a nokia :D. I keed I keed.

3) Default configuration should be very simple for casual users, but with the ability for power users to (officially) mod to their liking such as with rooting or jailbreaking.

4) A good app store that is easy to navigate and easy to find out what software is good and what is shit. Also, some sort of quality control for the "official app store". I don't need to view 6000 fart machines. Have the ability install software outside of the app store so that any restrictions on applications won't be a problem. Remember, the vast vast majority of phone users are casual users, so if the app store is spammed with fart machine #454 then it makes it hard to find what you want.
 
Ryan711 said:
If MS was smart here is what they should do

1) Unified hardware platform.
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Like I said earlier they took this one step further, they have a unified DEVELOPMENT platform in Visual Studio 2010. You write apps for Windows desktop AND phone using practically the same code and the tools are drop dead easy and already familiar to MILLIONS of developers around the globe.

Microsoft has taken a page out of playbook that has been VERY successful buy making the tools cheap and easy to use and much of your .NET can just drop right into these apps. Use the UI metaphors are different by necessity being a phone but is still Silverlight which is incredibly powerful. Microsoft apparently is throwing money as top tier phone developers to build apps and I think that there are going to be a lot of average Joe's like me that are simply trying to keep their Windows skills up to date that are going to be throwing thousands of apps at them over time.
 
heatlesssun said:
I will say this, I’ve been getting up to speed on the development tools and they are simply awesome, Microsoft simply knocked out a home run here, it’s pretty much a developer’s wet dream. It's not dissimilar to the dev tools for Windows Mobile 6.x but the fit and finish is excellent and there are templates for just about everything. It's all Silverlight and .NET so if you these tools already then have the skill set to develop for Win 7 Phones RIGHT NOW! Also a nice little touch, the emulator is multi-touch enabled for Tablet PCs! So even without a phone you can pretty much get the entire look and feel of your app nailed down in the emulator, which BTW is MUCH faster than the old 6.x one. The web browser even works on it. It’s a trip using the IE web browser in the emulator with multi-touch.

The base versions of the tools are free so not cost there but they don’t work on XP. If you’re a .NET developer and haven’t gotten into Silverlight this is a good chance. Even if you don’t plan on releasing an app (I’ve got a couple in the works that I hope to have done by the end of the year) for this phone this is great way to get into Sliverlight and WPF which are the future of Windows client GUI development. And boy is it powerful stuff but it does take a little time to get used to because it a much different GUI tool than you’d be used to in .NET Window Forms or even unmanaged code GUI development.

Get started here: http://developer.windowsphone.com/windows-phone-7/ . If you like to just write code this stuff is really fun and cool no matter what.

If the phones are half as good as these development tools Win 7 Phone will do fine.
Click to expand...


your post is the one that has given me optimism since I heard all the negative stuff about Windows 7 mobile. Gonna wait now (your fault ! :p )
 
as my contract ends soon i was going to wait as the HD1 that i use serves me well until win7mobo (and that i also have an HTC desire as well that i am quite fond of as its text input seems to work very well only thing missing is on screen arrows on the onscreen keypad that the HD1 has but desire does not)
 
I would like to see..

1. Xbox360 Integration or something like XBOX Mobile LIVE

2. I would like the phone to "Talk" to my PC. For instance I want to be able to transfer a word document I created on MS Office Mobile to my PC and vice versa

3. Windows Media Center integration (Remote app)

4. App store
 
Ashbringer said:
#3 Keep all the old functionality of Windows Mobile, like copy and paste.
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No copy & paste for Windows Phone 7.

Ashbringer said:
#4 Allow for customization. Android has a plethora of UI custimization, like Sense UI and Live Wallpapers. Nobody likes the one UI fits all method, like Apple has.
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You can change the background, if that does anything for you.

cliche said:
# Multitasking
Click to expand...
Nope. App developers don't have the capability to background processes like in iOS 4 nor do full multitasking ala Android. Very similar to iOS 3 in most respects.

Rob Black said:
1. Xbox360 Integration or something like XBOX Mobile LIVE
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That's already there, from what I understand.
 
Friends have said nothing but wonderful things about the developer tools. That is one thing MS is very good at, and it seems this is no different.

I am excited and think that way to many people are underestimating MS on this platform not matter how late they are.
 
#1 for android to somehow stop all development and cease to exist

#2 for Microsoft to somehow not be involved at all in Win Mo 7 decision making....
 
bacon said:
Friends have said nothing but wonderful things about the developer tools. That is one thing MS is very good at, and it seems this is no different.

I am excited and think that way to many people are underestimating MS on this platform not matter how late they are.
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brucedeluxe169 said:
#1 for android to somehow stop all development and cease to exist

#2 for Microsoft to somehow not be involved at all in Win Mo 7 decision making....
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One thing that Microsoft gets and does better than anyone is developers. Honestly Microsoft is COUNTING on android folks, a lot of whom happen to be Windows devlopers. Android devs will LOVE VS 2010 and devs LOVE trying new stuff. The iPhone, Android and Win 7 Phone are not mutually exclusive and all have a purpose. Win 7 Phone isn't meant to be like iPhone and Droid and that's smart. Believe it or not the iPhone and Droid actually don't serve everyones needs.
 
cliche said:
your post is the one that has given me optimism since I heard all the negative stuff about Windows 7 mobile. Gonna wait now (your fault ! :p )
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Thanks! Honestly I don't know how the numbers will work out in terms of sales, they are obvisouly aren't going to be record breaking but I do think the satisfaction level will be high like the Zune HD. Not big number in sales but customer satisfaction will be pretty high. The like HD, it's got 4.5/5 stars on Amazon, kind of hard to do better than that for customer satisfaction I'd say.
 
heatlesssun said:
This is one of the apps I'm working on right now. If you care to pass along any ideas please do!
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Cache of the currently playing song if the network dies. I hate it when i'm listening to a song and someone turns off the media server and its half way through. It might do this already but it annoys me!
 
even with cloud, having a SD card slot allows for cloud computing to be more efficient as you back everything important to the cloud while leaving the UI and users files on the SD card. Having the UI files like backgrounds on the SD card lets you put as many as you want with out running out space for contacts or pictures taken on the phone. Having your music and ebooks on the SD card mean that your files from your old phone just carry over as long as MS uses the same named folders.

ie
books >:\books
photos >:\DCIM
music >:\Music
ringtones >:\ringtones

borders app >:\BordersUS\epubs
and I image people have other folders that work on all droid phones...

Last without a SD card there is really no point to putting a camera on it since most people only take pictures with there cell phone when they see something and don't have a camera handy if you have to worry about space your not going to take pics spontaneously
 
Lack of multi-tasking is, at the moment, a big design decision for Microsoft. Whereas in WinMo 6.x you could have an unchecked number of backgrounded apps running and sucking your phone battery dry, Win 7 Phone allows only one app to run. You can still get push notifications (of a few different types) for your non-running apps. And your app can save its state when shut down, so that when it re-opens it appears to have left off where you last used it.

People keep bringing up multitasking, but they do not give any reasons why the need to have x number of apps running on a phone.

Now, I can think of one app that lack of multitasking would affect me. My GPS navigation app is a beast to open and get on a route. I cannot safely drive and work it at the same time. So if I am going to use it, I set it up and on route before I start driving, and I do not turn it off until I am done driving. If the save-state feature in Win 7 Phone can bypass all that, then I will happily shut it down and reopen later during my trips. If not, then I would not use the app and instead get a dedicated car GPS.
 
oh I can throw in a reason for multi-tasking looking up a phone number for someone while on the phone with them. ie I'm talking to friend on the phone and he needs the number for a company, or another friend and has lost the number...

as a pda or ebook reader playing music in the background...

people use their phones for different reasons, so choice is really the important thing, one phone does A and another does B. The end goal is everyone gets what they want out of their phone.
 
This mobile device has more going for it before it comes out than anything I have ever heard of. As far as I am concerned it is MS's to LOSE. As long as they have listened they will be okay. I am pretty sure they have after seeing the changes that occurred between Vista and 7.

I really want to see success from them on this. REAL success. Everyone should, because that means more competition, better prices and better products. I am willing to bet that MS will do this on the W7 Phone after the many mistakes they have made in the past, but we will see. It will only mean good things for all of us, even people who use competitor's phones.
 
I think that the multi-tasking issue is missunderstood. The OS handles it but Microsoft doesn't provide direct support for third party apps. I can for instance play music or surf or bring up an app on my Zune HD simultaneously today. What I can't do is run two third party apps at the same time. It's really no different that pre-OS4 iPhones and even the current version isn't what you'd call multi-tasking on a desktop. And the thing is that apps only have to save state properly and load it back quckly to pretty much LOOK like multi-tasking to the end user.

This is just the "safe" way to do it to keep the phone from looking sluggish. In time Microsoft will expose as the hardware and platforms mature.
 
This is from the Win 7 Phone training kit concerning multi-tasking, think I said basically the same thing but this is a more thorough explaination:

• Application Lifecycle
Only a single application can run in the foreground and no 3rd party applications are allowed to run in the background. Therefore when the user navigates away from your application, either to a chooser like picture chooser, or to a launcher like phone call, the Windows Phone operating system terminates your application. The procedure in which the operating system terminates an application’s process when the user navigates away from the application is called tombstoning. The operating system maintains state information about the application. If the user navigates back to the application, the operating system restarts the application process and passes the state data back to the application, where the user will be able to continue seamlessly from his last interaction point with the application. This lab focuses on the tombstone (or tombstoning) aspect of the Windows Phone Application Life Cycle.
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At lest with the emulator and doing by the book the effect to the end user wouldn't be able to tell the difference between this and multi-tasking. Yes, no backgound apps but notifications are more efficent and less battery killing than a background task. The point is to save battery and keep the phone resposive to what is on the screen. Once again the better approach for the average user, not guys here. Remember all that mutli-tasking comes at a price on battery driven machine, I think people seem to forget that in the phone debate. You can't have you cake and eat it too.

MasterShake said:
This mobile device has more going for it before it comes out than anything I have ever heard of. As far as I am concerned it is MS's to LOSE. As long as they have listened they will be okay. I am pretty sure they have after seeing the changes that occurred between Vista and 7.
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Very insightful. Microsoft is leveraging pretty much the best of its portfolio into this phone. I'm excited because I get to use my almost 10 years of .NET expereince on a clean slate device. It's the kind of thing a lot of devs dream about, a fresh canvas with no paint. I really don't see lack of apps being a problem. There's simply too many people like along with full-time professional developers that welcome this type of thing. It's not like the opportunity comes alone often. The iPhone and Adroid as awash in a sea of apps this is new.
 
heatlesssun said:
This is just the "safe" way to do it to keep the phone from looking sluggish. In time Microsoft will expose as the hardware and platforms mature.
Click to expand...

If a phone feels sluggish, it's because of high CPU and memory usage...which means it will also use more battery. So on a phone or small hand held, "true" multi tasking doesn't make sense. On the other hand, Android does this really well, freezing apps as needed to conserver resources and battery.

It's actually pretty convenient not having to worry about which apps are running and not. Unlike desktop Windows or Linux, there's no distinction between a running application and a closed app, and almost never an option to "Quit" an application. When you're done, you just tap the next app you want to use. Maybe this is how future versions of Windows should also work? The new taskbar in Windows 7 that mixes shortcuts and running programs is a step in that direction.
 
The scheduler in any OS could suspend execution of a process based on any number of criteria like CPU utilization. The approach here is obviously more basic. An app simply receives a notification that its being navigated away from and the app would save its state which it would reload upon entry. Not totally familiar with how the platform persists state but there are several methods depending on the context and speed at which you would want your app to resume.

It looks as though there is enough in the framework to pretty much obviate the need for multitasking in most cases for well written apps. My concern would be how fast a larger app could reload and resume, need to look into that.

One point about the new Windows 7 taskbar that that many miss, there's actually a very good UI reason for it in the context of touchscreen tablet devices. The default icon view and jumplists are VERY finger friendly and the metaphor works great on touch screens. Windows 7 was designed to actually be used on touch screen devices from the get go but few seem to realize this.
 
drakken said:
oh I can throw in a reason for multi-tasking looking up a phone number for someone while on the phone with them. ie I'm talking to friend on the phone and he needs the number for a company, or another friend and has lost the number...

as a pda or ebook reader playing music in the background...

people use their phones for different reasons, so choice is really the important thing, one phone does A and another does B. The end goal is everyone gets what they want out of their phone.
Click to expand...
Multitasking is important to me. For example, I was using my Android phone to play music, while I use the app Torque to clear my cars engine code, before that I used the web browser to see what the engine code is about. Now that's multitasking.
 
Ashbringer said:
Multitasking is important to me. For example, I was using my Android phone to play music, while I use the app Torque to clear my cars engine code, before that I used the web browser to see what the engine code is about. Now that's multitasking.
Click to expand...

And this scenario will work just fine on a Windows 7 Phone. Once again this only applies to third party apps and it's not that you won't be able to switch between apps and it LOOK like true multi-tasking. This is one of the most misunderstood issues in the phone space I believe. The only time that this would ever cause a real loss of functionality is background tasks, which is a no no for 3rd party apps on Windows 7 phones. The VAST majority of people would rather have a quicker phone with better battery life. Its a design consideration that makes sense and worked fine for Apple and others over the years.

If you MUST have 3rd party backgroud taks on your phone then the Droid is a better option. 99% of people simply don't need or care about this over the other cosiderations.
 
Q & A on Windows Phone 7 with ZDnet

Q: Can Windows Phone 7 devices multitask?

A: Kindel said Microsoft’s own “experiences” which are part of the Windows Phone 7 will allow for multitasking (i.e., music playing in the background while you’re doing e-mail). But third party applications won’t have the same multitasking capabilities, Kindel said.Developers will be able to use things like notifications to create the illusion that applications are always live. In addition, the Live tiles that are part of the new UI will be constantly updated in real time (also through notifications). Over time, as things like battery life, network utilization and application predictability improve for the Windows Phone platform, Microsoft will make more multitasking support available for all applications, Kindel said.
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So long as you stick to the Microsoft built-in apps, you can multitask. These include music, email, facebook, rss, etc. There is also some discussion within the developer community that while the user interface thread of a 3rd-party app is suspended, its worker / background threads can still use a limited set of built-in classes / methods and queue the returns to the user-interface thread for when it gets resumed.

Copy / paste does seem like a trivial thing to implement. I have not heard an explanation for why this is being left out of the initial release.
 
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