Yesterday, Microsoft announced the new Window Phone 7 Series(WP7S) at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. My initial reaction to the thought of another Windows phone was not a good one since I went through the pain of having one of their older versions a couple of year ago in which they tried and failed to run the Windows OS on a phone. It just wasn't pretty.

The New Look

After watching some of the live streamed press conference, I was delighted to see that they had completely revamped the UI for their next foray into the mobile phone. For a good look at what the new phone has to offer, I recommend you read this article on Gizmodo that has a very good overview of everything. Since I bought a Zune HD last year, I was impressed with what Microsoft had done with the UI on that device and was nicely surprised to find it was very different from anything I had seen from them previously. The new WP7S looks to have taken this slick UI and expanded on it to make the experience of using your phone much more enjoyable.

Good 'ol IE

Since this is a Microsoft product, we had to know that they would use Internet Explorer as their web browser. We can only hope that this implementation of it will be comparable to the browsers that run on the Android and iPhone. The up side is that it looks like IE on WP7S will support multitouch out of the box, which is important for any smart phone browser.

The Futurepast

Many of the comments that were coming across on Twitter yesterday appeared to say something to the effect that this new phone has "out Appled Apple" as is discussed in this article on Gizmodo. The new UI is a different take on how a person can interact with their phone to get the information they want.

I think that Microsoft had to do this in order to try and gain their corner of the market share. They are already late to the game, so they needed to use a new take on this interaction in order to get people to think of them as a viable option. This new mode of interaction could be the future, but are people going to take to it with the more app centric model that we are used to from the past and present.

Shoe Phone?

On a somewhat related note, I came across this article talking about another new phone that will be coming out from Puma. The Phone does have some cool features like a solar panel on the back for charging, but there is really going to be a Puma Phone? What's next, a Ferrari Phone?

Surfing the internet this morning, I came across some tidbits on Engadget that caught my eye of new gadgets and technology that would go quite nicely in my house.

3D At Home!

I had previously heard stories that Sony was planning to broadcast several of the World Cup games in 3D at certain venues, but according to this article, it sounds like several of the games will also be broadcast on a new channel that is launching, ESPN 3D. It also sounds like Discovery will be joining the 3D game as well, and what could be cooler than shark week in 3D. Long story short, I may need to upgrade my current tv unit, seeing as how the last time I bought a tv was so that I could watch the last World Cup in 2006 in HD.

Touch

Another area of tech that I am extremely interested in is touch. Having built several applications for the Microsoft Surface, I feel that touch and multi-touch computing are where things are heading. Not necessarily for much of the current work we do such as coding, but it definitely has the possiblity to expand consumer interaction in many ways. Enter the Light Touch from Light Blue Optics. This cool little gadget can turn any flat surface into a 10-inch touch screen and could be useful in retail situations, as is depicted in the pics from the Engadget article. Check out this simulated demo from the Light Blue Optics site:

Touch + Touch + ... + Touch = Multitouch

Another item that I came across on Engadget was this multitouch monitor from 3M. This monitor boasts the ability to track 10 points of contact, making it possible to use both hands and is Windows 7 compatible. Looks like a step in the right direction for single user multitouch. Now, if I can only convince work to buy me one for "testing"...