Windows Phone 7 Hits Technical Preview Milestone

suraj.sun writes "Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system has today reached its biggest milestone yet, with a technical preview announced placing the OS on the 'home stretch' to launch. 'We are certainly not done yet — but the craftsmen (and women) of our team have signed off that our software is now ready for the hands-on everyday use of a broad set of consumers around the world — and we're looking forward to their feedback in the coming weeks, so that we can finish the best Windows Phone release ever together,' Terry Myerson, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Windows Phone Engineering, wrote tonight." There's coverage around the net including CNet, NeoWin and Engadget.

Who cares.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some OS that no phones care about hits a milestone that no-one was waiting for.

Nice

[TrisexualPuppy]

I foresee that this will be like Vista, Win7, or Zune. It's all hyped up by Microsoft's marketing department where advertising money is no object, and a few people buy it, and whammo! Kludgy, weird user interface that is harder to use than what they had out ten years ago (e.g. Win CE).

Re:Ah, let's just call it done

[Crudely_Indecent]

Parent failed to attribute Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_Marketplace#Content_Restrictions [wikipedia.org] )

Re:Nice

[GF678]

Well it would have been nice if Microsoft bothered to sell the Zune overseas, such as here in Australia. But they didn't. Why they didn't is an exercise left up to those who give a shit. Not my problem if Microsoft didn't think seriously enough about their product to warrant worldwide competition with the iPod.

Re:Never a head start

[tayhimself]

Not sure why you couldn't google it, but none of the google images show devices looking anything like iPhones. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Android+prototypes [lmgtfy.com]

Re:Sex Everywhere Already

[mcgrew]

It's not a ban, it's just a choice not to sell it through a corporate channel with a brand to maintain.

Quote the GP:

Microsoft said that applications containing pornography will be prevented from being installed on Windows Phone 7, as well as applications containing images that fit the definition of "sexually suggestive". Violence and all nudity will be censored from apps. Suggestions or depictions of prostitution, sexual fetishes, or basically anything that "a reasonable person would consider to be adult or borderline adult content" will be forbidden from Windows Phone 7 apps.

Yes, it's Microsoft's choice to shoot themselves in the foot if they wish. I, for one, will NOT buy a phone that limits MY choices. If I want porn on my phone, I'll put porn on my phone, and nobody that sells a phone with built in censorship will sell one to me; they're shit out of luck.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Statement from Redmond..

"Windows Phone 7 Series will not initially offer copy and paste; instead, we try to solve the most common uses for copy and paste via single-tap action. For example, people often want to take an address and view it on a map, highlight a term in the browser and do a search or copy a phone number to make a call. Instead of the user manually doing a copy and paste in these scenarios, we recognize those situations automatically and make them happen with just one touch. In our early testing people have been pleased with this approach, but we're always listening to feedback and will continue to improve our feature set over time based on what we hear."

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/19/microsoft-windows-phone-7-series-will-not-initially-offer-copy/ [engadget.com]

Re:I kept hoping ...

[shutdown -p now]

I think that's precisely the problem with WP7.

For those with WM background, it kills off all the features that were liked (by some) in WM. A lot of people liked it for being extensible (apps etc) and hackable. For example, wireless hotspot functionality, just added to Android, was on WM years ago. Multitasking, copy-paste - if, in 2005, you'd tell a WM user that he would not find them on a smartphone released in two years, he'd laugh in your face. And some - like you? - even liked the stylus-driven interface, because that allows smaller controls, and therefore more information displayed on the screen at once.

The other, broader category is people coming from Android and, especially, iPhone. Their first question will be, "so what does it do better". And I don't see anything really compelling in that department. The UI is fairly different, which may prove to be easier to use (I don't have any definite opinion, and it's hard to make any objective conclusions until you get a chance to hold and use an actual phone with it - emulator is unhelpful there), but that's about it. All other features are available elsewhere, and there are more of them, too, even in traditionally feature-limited iPhone. The only point which may affect things, and on which there is no clarity yet, is how the app landscape will look like. Which leads us to the next thing.

WP7 development tools are good and easy to use; subjectively more so than on any other mobile platform with the possible exception of WM (it would be very surprising if that wasn't true...). But restricting it to .NET apps only, and then also to verifiable subset of CIL (meaning: no C/C++, not even compiled to CIL), means that developers are rather limited in what they can do compared to iOS or Android. Portability and cross-platform code reuse? Forget it. APIs, too - there's decent coverage of UI-related stuff, but pretty much everything else is unimpressive.

It might be that the sheer ease and cost of development (VS Phone Express is free, and unlike Xcode you don't need a Mac - which most people don't have - to run it) will be enough to generate enough developer interest to get a good kickstart for the app store... but it's all a very big if.