Microsoft gets desperate with Windows Phone 7

Remember when Microsoft was that evil company that made lousy software and was taking over the world? Well, "evil" might have been a bit of a stretch, and the company seems to have lost the world domination battle to Apple, at least in the consumer market. As for that lousy software? Well, Microsoft is now releasing a completely new version of their mobile phone OS, called, somewhat confusingly, Windows Phone 7.

Microsoft is clearly trying really, really hard to make its product stand out in the crowded mobile market. But is that really a good thing? Businessweek made the following remarks about the new OS:

Windows Phone 7 is nothing to be embarrassed about. Microsoft deserves credit for doing some things that go against the prevailing smartphone norm. Instead of a screen covered with little app icons, users get a set of colorful rectangles that Microsoft calls "live tiles."

But see, here's the thing -- people know and understand a screen covered with little app icons. Why would iPhones be so popular in the first place if they didn't? Why else would other smart phone operating systems fill their screens with little app icons? I know what an app icon is. I have no idea what a "live tile" is.

Businessweek goes on to describe more about WP7. See if you can understand this:

There are six hubs: People, Pictures, Music & Videos, Marketplace, Microsoft Office, and Games. The People hub, for instance, aggregates your address book, Facebook friend list, and updates in one place. Music & Videos is based on Microsoft's Zune software, which is easy to use and syncs with content on your computer. Pictures is a home for your snapshots and a portal to others' Facebook photos. The hubs are easy to grasp, but not nearly comprehensive enough. Facebook is well integrated into the People hub—but Twitter isn't. The Pictures hub is great if you use Facebook or Windows Live. Prefer Flickr? It's a hassle. You can customize the home screen with your own tiles or add apps, but you'll find yourself scrolling through tiresome lists.

Somehow I doubt that the hubs will be "easy to grasp" for the average user, at least compared to those silly old app icons that everyone else uses.

Of course Microsoft has all kinds of promo videos for their new product. Here we see the "live tiles" in action:



Not very impressive. Microsoft seems to think that we all really love context menus. We don't. Moreover, they seem thrilled by the fact that you can "personalize" your phone by changing the colour of the tiles. They seem to forget that iPhones let you put up your own wallpaper images.

Here you'll find that The Christian Science Monitor has a nice round-up of several WP7 reviews, which are decidedly mixed. One issue in particular stood out for me:

David Pogue of the New York Times also finds plenty missing from the Windows Phone 7 OS. "Like the iPhone," Pogue writes, "the Web browser doesn’t play Flash videos on the Web — but it also won’t play the HTML5 videos that the iPhone plays, or even videos in Microsoft’s own Silverlight format. So, no YouTube, no Hulu, no online news videos."

Sorry, Microsoft. Weak video support means you've lost most of your market. Maybe you can do better with Windows Phone 8.