Microsoft’s mobile comeback
Microsoft, which has fallen into obscurity in the smartphone market in recent years, is back with a bang. This year, it will launch a completely revamped mobile operating system with one-touch access to internet browsing, social networking applications, photos and videos.
The system, which is called Windows Phone 7 Series, will ditch the awkward menu based list system that led to most mobile phone manufacturers abandoning the platform. Instead, it will try to replicate a simple, user-friendly system that has been adopted by Apple and Google.
Having once been a top three smartphone software supplier, Microsoft’s global market share in the smartphone market has declined to about 7 per cent.
Recent smartphones from HTC, Sony Ericsson and Samsung have attempted to gloss over Windows Mobile’s old fashioned rigidity with their own systems. But consumers have largely stayed away from the software giant’s mobile offerings.
Although Microsoft will not release the first Windows Phone 7model until much later in the year, it has released early examples of the product, largely for the benefit of app developers and mobile operators.
Design
The most obvious design feature of the new system is the interface’s similarity to Zune, the MP3 player that Microsoft never launched in Europe.
When switched on, the screen will divide into large, simple tiles, made up of often-used applications or short-cuts.
The tiles will be ‘live’, meaning that a Twitter or Facebook tile will update itself without being relaunched.
Rather than negotiating a series of menus and lists to alter the appearance or ordering of tiles, you can simply move and drag them wherever you like.
Like Android phones, all Windows Phone 7 handsets will also have the same three buttons on the exterior of the phone: home, search and back.
Finally, the system will support multi-touch, the ability to use two fingers to achieve actions such as zooming in or switching windows.
One of the biggest changes that Microsoft is introducing is a new ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ approach to manufacturers.
Phone 7 will not be customisable with the ‘flavours’ that some manufacturers currently layer on top of Windows Mobile 6.5.
This will especially affect phone makers such as HTC, which has developed a sophisticated micro interface to gloss over the rigidity of Windows Mobile 6.5.
Social networking and photos
One of the operating system’s biggest buzz terms is ‘hub’.
There is a ‘people hub’, a ‘pictures hub’ and even an ‘Office hub’. The people hub is a little like Vodafone’s 365 networking platform, in that it organises social network contacts into three screens: ‘recent’, ‘all’ and ‘what’s new’. ‘All’ displays all of your contacts and friends, alphabetically.
‘What’s new’ and ‘Recent’ both show the status or musings of contacts who have just updated their profiles or accounts with something.
In a similar way, the phone’s Pictures hub shows you all of your most recent photos, in addition to the most recent photos uploaded by your social networking contacts to their Facebook accounts.
Work and Office
Traditionally, those who opt for Windows Mobile phones do so because of their ability to synchronise with Microsoft Exchange, Outlook and Office.
This will continue in the guise of Phone 7’s ‘Office hub’. This will expand on the Office applications you can currently work on with Windows smartphones.
In particular, it will incorporate Sharepoint, Microsoft’s ‘collaboration’ software. Sharepoint is mainly used for people who want to add text or images or remarks to someone else’s PowerPoint presentation.
The Office hub will also include OneNote and Documents.
And it will have a more sophisticated, feature-rich version of Outlook that adds some features only available on desktop versions up to now.
Competition
In the smartphone market, Microsoft is currently a long way off the mark. The latest market share statistics from Gartner claim that Windows Mobile is the system on just 7 per cent of smartphones.
This is a long way behind market leaders Nokia (on 45 per cent), BlackBerry (21 per cent) and Apple (17 per cent).
Even Google’s Android, which has only been available for about a year, has 3.5 per cent market share, half that of Windows Mobile.
This year will see competition in the smartphone market intensifying. Aside from further Android models to be released, Nokia has a new smartphone platform, Maemo, that it intends to push onto high-end devices.
Palm is also expected to update its Pre operating system by the summer, while operators such as Vodafone are persisting with aggressively marketing in-house interfaces such as Vodafone 365
