Windows Phone 7 Thoughts
Yesterday I saw a preview of a
Windows Phone 7 (WP7, or
#WP7 on Twitter) when
Joey deVilla and
John Bristowe were in town for
a one day coffee and code
at a Second Cup in downtown Edmonton.
I'm not going to do a big preview of the phone, I didn't get that kind of
access. I tried out a demo phone running Windows Phone 7 software.
Engadget did a great preview
with lots of details. Is Windows 7 going to kill the iPhone? I really doubt
it. Will it kill Android? I think its likely to take a lot of market from
Android, but I'll talk about that later.
I'm not interested in Apps. WP7 will have Twitter apps, and has Facebook
integration built in. Probably a lot of the popular iPhone and Android
software will eventually get ported over to WP7. As a web developer I am most
interested in the web browsing experience, and it looked pretty good.
The Web Browser
The WP7 web browser is based on desktop Internet Explorer 7, but it isn't IE7.
Joey said he liked to call it IE7.5; it also has a lot from IE8 put in it. He
told me Microsoft is working hard on porting a lot of the HTML5 goodness from
IE9 onto the phone, but I wouldn't expect that until WP8. I think this is
pretty amazing myself, because they are using the same software as the desktop
browsers on the phone. Since it is based on the desktop software I'm sure we
can expect it to have a lot of the features of the desktop software.
Unfortunately IE7 wasn't really all that great to begin with, it was just a
marked improvement on IE6.
I am glad it isn't another WebKit browser,
the browser engine behind iPhone's Safari and Android's browser and the new
browser on the BlackBerry Torch. Why? Just because its good to see
competition. WebKit is an excellent browser, but it is lacking HTML5 support
in many areas also. Competition will improve this.
The Windows Phone 7 User Interface
The UI is very different from any I'd used before. On computers we are used to
scrolling up and down only, and for the most part that is true on phones as
well. The iPhone has pages of apps that you scroll sideways on, but it wasn't
the same as on the WP7 UI. The WP7 UI is based around hubs, shown as squares
on the main page. The biggest difference I saw was just how much
side-scrolling was used in the page menus. You could tell each swipe brought
you something different, another context. It was very interesting and
intuitive.
Predictions: The Future vs. Android
I said earlier that I thought that WP7 could take market share from Android,
and I really do think so. Android has good potential as a platform, its open
source (sort of)
and can be customized by manufacturers. Unfortunately the manufacturers don't
do it well. Their software is terrible and this results in an unstable phone
that crashes a lot. My brother has told me he can't even take pictures anymore
without having his phone reboot! The manufacturers are also tight about
allowing OS upgrades because they would rather you buy a new handset from
them. With the iPhone 4 coming out, I'm hearing a lot of people say
they wish they had gotten an iPhone instead of an Android and will not buy
an Android again.
Windows Phone 7 has the potential to break this. From what I understand the
basic WP7 OS will be the same across all manufacturers without customization.
Upgrades will be via Microsoft (probably like Windows Update). No more
TouchFLO, no specific
Motorola bits. The main difference between WP7 phones will be in the hardware
- cameras, memory, processor speeds. This means a much more consistent look
and feel, and hopefully better reliability.
I see most of the WP7 market share being taken from Android.
Predictions: The Future vs. iPhone
I don't think WP7 will beat iPhone right now. Perhaps Windows Phone 8 will
compete better, but WP7 lacks too many features that are already in iPhone 4:
cut and paste, multitasking and a huge lead in App development. iPhone also
has something that neither Android/Google or Microsoft have:
fanbois.
Sure there are a few Android and Microsoft fanboys out there, but Apple has a
rabid and loyal following, whereas Microsoft is mostly derided and Google
taken for granted as the search engine and nothing more.
Microsoft didn't buy any loyal fans with their previous generations of phone
software. Windows Phone 6 was a flop. Microsoft released the
Kin back in June but
bailed completely by August. Not enough time to gain a following. But on the
other hand,
Tony Curtis was buried with his iPhone
- inseparable even in death.
Apple's high-price-for-high-quality reputation is starting to get tarnished.
Call quality has never been great on the iPhone in the first three generations
and with the iPhone 4 "Antennagate" fiasco, I wonder if some people might
start to get dissatisfied with Apple and its poor customer support. Apple's
first acknowledgment of the antenna problem was
to say they were reporting the signal quality wrong
this whole time.
Predictions: The Future vs. BlackBerry
BlackBerry is a different kind of animal - its more of a work phone. With
Microsoft's strong exchange integration I could see them taking a lot more of
BlackBerry's market-share away. BlackBerry doesn't make good consumer phones.
The Storm flopped (don't I know it), the new Torch is supposed to be really
good, and we'll have to see, but its not making enough of a mark in the market
right now. I'm predicting that BlackBerry may eventually start selling Windows
Phones because innovating with their OS is too expensive and difficult.
Handsets:
Antenna problems excluded, the current iPhone 4 hardware is amazing: 1GHz
processor, 16GB or 32GB of space, an amazing camera and that gorgeous Retina
Display screen technology. I'm sure that there will be a lot of comparable
hardware for WP7 out there, but will it be significantly cheaper? I believe
Android is popular is because the handsets are cheap. If WP7 phones can come
out and be $100, $200 cheaper than iPhone then it might compete a little
better.
The WP7 phone I saw yesterday had LG branding on it, and the Engadget phone
was a Samsung. These are two great hardware brands. I looked closely at the LG
screen, and I'm sure it wasn't quite as high-resolution as the iPhone Retina
display, but it was still very very good - better than an iPhone 3GS. It was
probably in the 800x400 pixel range, where the iPhone 4 has 960x640 pixels in
probably the same area.
But the LG did have a slide-out keyboard. While this isn't really
that that important, a lot of people want keyboards on their phone -
and this illustrates my point: when you buy an iPhone 4 you get the same
iPhone 4 as
Stephen Fry, Tony Curtis and Steve Jobs. You get the same iPhone on Telus, Bell or
Rogers. If you get a WP7 phone you'll get more options, just like with Windows
PCs. Do you want one with an 8MP camera, or 5MP camera, or no camera? A
slide-out keyboard or not? This is both good and bad because we'll have shop
in the WP7 market, and some phones will only be available with some carriers.
But we'll probably also see phones from $399 up, whereas with iPhone you get
16GB for $659 or 32GB for $779.
Apple's stand (on all their hardware) has been higher price for
higher quality. Apple's quality is questioned a lot more now, but they still
have a great reputation. Consumers will not know how reliable their WP7
handset will be.
Developers, Developers, Developers
As usual, Microsoft is betting the bank on
developers (developers developers developers)
to build compelling apps for their platforms. WP7 uses
Silverlight, a simplified version of
their Windows Presentation Foundation user interface designed for the web, and
now for devices. Any developer using familiar .NET languages like C# and
VB.NET can develop apps for the Windows Phone now - without having to pay
extra for the SDKs. Even the tools will be free.
To develop on the iPhone you have to own a Mac (expensive) and XCode. You
cannot develop for iPhone on Windows or Linux using the Apple tools.
Developing for iPhone requires learning a new programming language
(Objective-C) and libraries. Objective-C itself is an older lower-level
language than .NET or Java and requires memory management and other tools
developers really don't do anymore in a 'modern' language, increasing the
learning curve.
To develop for Android you only need the SDK and Eclipse, both freely
available for Windows, Linux and OSX. Android runs applications programmed in
Java, a fairly modern and well taught language (most university Computer
Science and Engineering students in the past ten years have had some exposure
to Java).
I think Microsoft really has the advantage here. Most Windows developers will
be able to easily get into Windows Phone development. Microsoft is also very
good at finding ways to help developers use more of their "stack" - and
Microsoft has a much bigger programming stack than Apple: Azure for Cloud
Computing and storage, tons of Silverlight components from 3rd Party partners
like Telerik and Infragistics, ASP.NET for web service development, CodePlex
for open-source project hosting - all of this tied together through the Visual
Studio platform.
Perhaps only Google has a bigger web stack, but they have nothing tying it all
together.
Probably even more telling is the fact that Microsoft has sent out its
evangelists even to major Canadian cities to help out developers and encourage
them to develop on the platform. As far as I know, Apple does not do that, and
neither does Google. Microsoft is pushing hard to succeed here.
Conclusion
Microsoft has probably built a very compelling alternative phone in WP7. I'm
looking forward to the launch and the months and years that follow. I'm not
predicting the end of the iPhone, but I see the Android and BlackBerry
platforms losing a lot of ground to WP7 - provided that Windows Phone can be
more stable than Android and a better office/work experience than BlackBerry.