Windows Phone 7: A Big Bet

"Maybe we'll get lucky with this number seven." It was a throw-away comment from a refulgent Steve Ballmer at the end of Microsoft's standing-room-only press conference here in Barcelona, an apt epilogue on the world's worst kept secret, the official unveiling of Windows Mobile 7 (sorry, that's Windows Phone 7 Series; is it WinPho now?). Unveiled, but with too much left veiled. These are leaky times, though, and Microsoft was right to do it in this seemingly fecund soil of mobile platforms. Now it has made its bet, and it is a big one, a departure for all the marbles.For an overview of new features and first impressions, read Eric Zeman's blog here; this includes a quick video demonstration. You can also read Paul McDougall's news analysis here.

Also, you can watch a quick demonstration of Windows Phone 7 Series in this short video below.

Steve Ballmer and Microsoft's Windows Phone program manager, Joe Belfiore made the typical elegiac press conference pronouncements. "A different kind of phone," they said. "Designed for life in motion," they dreamed. Why, I almost got teary eyed. I don't know about life in motion, but it is different, and it is better. It might even be the same sort of impudent surprise Palm first delivered with its Pre. Invariably some will love it, some will loathe it, and, this being Microsoft, it will compete, which should make for fun sport in the enterprise IT and consumer markets.

For the end-user, there's plenty to like. A cleaner, polished interface that is nothing like Windows Mobile. What's inventive is that Microsoft has put content at the center of the user experience. This notion of "hubs" (people, picture, office, music and video) unshackles our application centricity and ties us to a task or a goal or an outcome. It's inventive in theory, anyway.

So too is navigation, the panning and the scrolling; but these are to be expected, just like multi-touch gestures. It's all finally there, though and it worked well on the prototype device Microsoft demonstrated on stage and in private meetings later.

(Note: As impressive as some of these new user interfaces are, I saw one stunningly new concept from an Israeli company called Else. I'll report more on this later, including a video demonstration.)

There are three buttons on the phone: start, search (brings up slick version of Bing, with hyperlinks within the search results) and back. Simple. Microsoft told me after the press conference that it was going to be much stricter with the hardware specifications -- in other words, they'll take care of all the software (user interface, drivers, features like the software keyboard, of which I'm still not a fan), but the device makers will build the phones just the way Microsoft wants. (And with ARM cores and Qualcomm's integrated Snapdragon processor.)

There will be more to learn about the Xbox Live functionality (built in and on display, but no word about game support), but bringing the popular game platform and a robust music service (Zune) into the device leaves out only the notion of an e-reader (did anyone say Windows Tablet? No? OK, just checking).

Microsoft also said that it is bringing the social world to this phone platform in a more automated way. (And no, not just Microsoft's social world.) It knows who its user communicates with, and those contacts become prioritized in the hubs, and the web-based information about those contacts stays live (if a photo changes in the cloud, it changes on the platform as well). It also pulls in and displays all of the recent activity for that contact. Smart stuff.

Still, so much is unknown, but we're promised more bite-sized nuggets at MIX 10 in Las Vegas in mid-March.

Microsoft did say that while there will be prototypes throughout the year, we won't see products until the 2010 holiday season. That's at least two false economic recoveries from now.

They announced that AT&T and Orange were their mobile operator partners (Verizon, for all its network success, keeps getting shut out of deals, or perhaps it's deciding it doesn't like the terms Apple and Microsoft are demanding; AT&T for all of the punishment it takes continues to score). They announced a handful of hardware partners, but wouldn't reveal who would be the first out with a device. Most important, it refused to talk about the development platform, and that probably means that developers will have to start largely from scratch. Ballmer did say the company would continue to invest in Windows Mobile 6.5, which simply means that they don't want to anger or abandon developers. If Windows Mobile 6.5 apps would work on the new platform, Microsoft would have simply said so. Perhaps it rushed the new software to the stage before it could get the marquis names on deck, but I'm sure there's already plenty of grumbling going on.

Finally, Microsoft would not talk about device management -- security features, policy settings, backup and restore, remote data wipes, or anything that corporate IT shops insist on today. However, end user management is an area Microsoft understands well, even if they occasionally screw it up. It would be surprising if it didn't include it, along with a host of other features (there's no Flash, and there wasn't even talk of Silverlight), given that it has an entire gestation period within which to accomplish and reveal more.

Fritz Nelson is the editorial director for InformationWeek and the Executive Producer of TechWebTV. Fritz writes about startups and established companies alike, but likes to exploit multiple forms of media into his writing.

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