Microsoft Back In The Game
August 31st, 2010 | by Mobile Data Group |Microsoft has demonstrated the first working models of what it hopes will be its iPhone-killing smartphone. The company showed handsets from Samsung, HTC and LG loaded with the new Windows Phone 7 operating system at its Tech.Ed conference on the Gold Coast last week.
It replaces Windows Mobile, which was used widely by large companies but failed to capture the imagination of consumers and small businesses.
The company has been criticised for taking too long to rise to the challenge thrown down by the Apple iPhone and new Android smartphones, in the process forgoing the lucrative consumer market and losing popularity among business customers, who took to the app craze because it offered quick solutions to business problems.
So the old operating system - its latest incarnation is WM6.5 - was dumped for being too complicated, ill-suited to application developers and too distant from the intuitive interface now expected of mobile phones and the platform was redesigned from scratch.
It is now much more user friendly, borrowing features from the iPhone, Android models and HTC’s Sense software to try to go one step ahead.
Instead of icons, the phone has square “tiles” to display basic functions and group multimedia, social networking, games and Office on the home screen.
The director of mobility products for Telstra, Richard Fink, says WP7 will compete strongly despite the proliferation of mobile operating systems and the popularity of BlackBerrys and iPhones among business customers. “I think it will compete very well,” Fink says. “We want everyone to be strong: Microsoft, Apple, RIM and Android. We think Microsoft is back in the game.”