Windows Phone 7 Series Takeaway

Microsoft's App Store

Also among the hubs that were left unexplored were Marketplace/Applications and Office. There's just as much potential in the Office hub as there is in the Gaming hub. Apple surprised many with its focus on enabling iWork on the iPad. Windows Phone 7 Series should have at least an equal focus on productivity. More questions abound. Backwards compatibility seems unlikely to impossible at this point, which would mean an entirely new and different application marketplace from the existing catalog on Windows Mobile. That's not necessarily a bad thing, either. One could make the case that none of the application stores currently on any of the smartphone platforms have totally gotten the formula right; there's still room for innovation. To date, each of the manufacturers have placed different emphasis of openness, organization, and approval ease (or lack entirely).

Furthermore, Office will likely have to be completely rewritten to match the Metro design of the rest of the UI. To complicate this further, it appears that Phone 7 also does away with File Explorer as it existed with Windows Mobile 6.5.x. It's very likely that Phone 7 Series will take a nod from the iPhone's file management approach and create per-application stores for sandboxing files with specific apps. Whether applications will be allowed to access a common store of files (especially for suites like office) is yet to be seen. Will Phone 7 Series have copy and paste?

Even more interestingly, it remains to be seen what part "Project Pink" has to play with Phone 7 Series, if any.

Final Words

Windows Phone 7 Series illustrates that Microsoft still hasn't lost the ability to innovate. They've come up with a completely redesigned UI and a new vision for Windows on phones. Even more, they have the experience to back it up and potentially turn it into much more than another rebooted smartphone platform vying for market share. That said, essentially all we've seen so far is a new UI, not a completely rebooted platform complete with fleshed out details. To quote an overused adage; the devil is in those details. How open or closed the platform is, what liberties developers will have with tiles, backgrounding and pseudo-multitasking, what tools and SDKs will be made available, what form the marketplace will take; these are just some of the points that will need to be addressed before Windows Phone 7 Series is a clear contender. 

An additional consequence of application stores on the current dominant platforms is that users of both Android, iPhone OS, and even WebOS have become invested in their respective platforms. The notion of switching platforms and waving goodbye to both those applications and the workflow behind them might not be a tough thing to swallow for AnandTech readers (especially those of you that have been through it before with other mobile OSes), it's a tough sell for casual smartphone users. Lack of backwards compatibility means that even existing Windows Mobile diehards have an opportunity to re-evaluate platform choice; one can just as easily pack up and move to any of the other platforms given the inconvenience. 

The Windows Phone team needs to spend the next 9 months carefully carrying its fledgling platform to term. By then, it will be competing for attention alongside newly refreshed hardware from virtually all its major competitors. A lot still has yet to be unveiled; it's just too early to tell for certain. MIX 2010 will bring new information, answering some questions and likely making more.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this newly proposed platform is how much it represents a move toward a closed paradigm. While the Windows smartphone message is headed towards an iPhone-like approach, other smartphone contenders like Android are busily marching toward the kind of openness that Windows Mobile used to be favored for.

Further Reading