by SwervinErv
on 02.16.2010
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?