http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowsphone/

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703525704575061253074391256.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_technology

Quote :

" Microsoft Corp. plans to introduce long-awaited new software for powering cellphones on Monday, as the company seeks to regain a technology edge in the market against rivals like Apple Inc. and Google Inc. At a wireless industry conference in Barcelona on Monday, the company plans to publicly show a new version of its cellphone operating system, Windows Mobile 7, for the first time, according to people familiar with the matter. The operating system sports a revamped user interface that resembles the look of Microsoft's Zune HD music player, people who have seen it said. "

http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft039s-steve-ballmer-to-host-windows-phone-announcements-at-mwc-2010

Quote :

"Microsoft officials have confirmed to Neowin that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will be hosting the Windows Phone Press Conference at Mobile World Congress 2010 next week. The confirmation of Steve Ballmer's attendance signals a significant product announcement next week in Barcelona. Neowin sources have confirmed that Ballmer will unveil Windows Mobile 7 which will include a Zune HD like interface codenamed "Metro", Xbox and Bing intergration (including navigation), Zune music software and improved games support. Microsoft are expected to demo several features of the new smartphone operating system but devices will not be available immediately and will ship later in the year."

guess we'll find out on Monday.

new Microsoft marketplace? zune UI? xbox integration? sounds pretty promising, albeit 2 years late.

2/12/2010 3:04:45 PM

sounds interesting and good. it's nice to see all of these companies trying to one up each other and competing in the same markets. /tsb

2/12/2010 3:06:42 PM

let's hope the windows mobile 7.0 apps run on zune and vice-versa.

2/12/2010 3:08:06 PM

zune hd runs winCE and all the apps are .net so they should all work unless someone does something really stupid to break them on purpose.

2/12/2010 3:09:15 PM

Oh man, a next gen .net phone.

If this has some good features, and verizon carrys it, count me in.

2/12/2010 3:13:17 PM

it would be interesting to see if they actually market their own phone hardware. More likely they'll just announce winmo7 and demo phone running it from your traditional winmo phone guys.

2/12/2010 3:25:31 PM

i wouldn't be all that optimistic...all the Windows phones I've used in the past have been crap imo (granted it been a few years...but i don't see that mattering much).

they should call it something other than "windows mobile X" to differentiate it from that crap they used to produce

2/12/2010 3:57:55 PM

hopefully this makes it onto the new htc 1ghz snapdragon slider

2/12/2010 4:22:43 PM

6.5 was shit, this better me a huge improvement.

2/12/2010 5:13:48 PM

do not want

2/13/2010 12:15:48 PM

winmo is a lame duck

2/13/2010 3:23:31 PM

Quote :

"zune hd runs winCE"

No it doesn't. It is it's own platform.

Quote :

"it would be interesting to see if they actually market their own phone hardware"

Not going to happen. Microsoft isn't going to cannibalize their own market like Google is doing.

Quote :

"i wouldn't be all that optimistic...all the Windows phones I've used in the past have been crap imo ... they should call it something other than "windows mobile X" to differentiate it from that crap they used to produce"

You haven't been paying attention then. There is pretty much hardware parity across the platforms. Everything is running the same few ARM core CPUS (qualcomm, motorola) and virtually the same internals.

And they did, it's called Windows Phone.

2/13/2010 5:27:23 PM

Quote :

"i wouldn't be all that optimistic...all the Windows phones I've used in the past have been crap imo (granted it been a few years...but i don't see that mattering much)."

2/13/2010 5:32:15 PM

Quote :

"No it doesn't. It is it's own platform."

Nope. It runs Windows CE 6.0. Just like Touch Flo, or whatever HTC puts on its phones, the underlying OS has very little to do with what the interface actually looks like.

2/14/2010 6:10:35 PM

yup ^ - zune's OS is based on WinCE

2/14/2010 8:20:25 PM

pretty interesting change - i'm not convinced yet but with a year more of development who knows what it will end up like

2/15/2010 10:42:22 AM

Write up, pics, and video demo:
http://gizmodo.com/5471805/windows-phone-7-series-everything-is-different-now

Looks pretty sweet if you ask me.

2/15/2010 10:42:54 AM

yea im watching http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowsphone/liveEvent.aspx right now.

The live icons or whatever are a pretty cool idea. I really like the idea of instead of forcing things like facebook or pandora into their own apps, they add functionality to the core applications.

2/15/2010 10:57:55 AM

^ the replay? it's over

2/15/2010 11:32:29 AM

Drag the seeker back to ~6:11 (instant seek owns, silverlight owns)

2/15/2010 11:35:22 AM

I wonder if the Windows Phone will support Silverlight. I didn't see anything about it when skimming through the Engadget and Gizmodo articles, but I'd be floored if it didn't.

2/15/2010 11:49:59 AM

just watched the walkthrough on engadget, looks ugly and the OS is not appealing to me. seems like it's pretty awkward and difficult to maneuver.

2/15/2010 2:20:43 PM

^ it is a WINDOWS phone...

2/15/2010 2:53:00 PM

Best I can tell, it seem multitasking will not survive the transition to the 7 series... Why? What benefit could this possibly offer? Windows CE supports multitasking, why turn it off? It is really soo critical for a menu not to stutter when the user is re-encoding a video in the background?

2/15/2010 8:30:12 PM

yeah, I'm not impressed. Looks like another windows mobile fail.

2/15/2010 8:51:57 PM

Quote :

"looks ugly and the OS is not appealing to me. seems like it's pretty awkward and difficult to maneuver. ... yeah, I'm not impressed. Looks like another windows mobile fail."

Sticking your head in the sand while the world passes you by must be pretty fun.

Quote :

"Best I can tell, it seem multitasking will not survive the transition to the 7 series... Why? What benefit could this possibly offer? Windows CE supports multitasking, why turn it off? It is really soo critical for a menu not to stutter when the user is re-encoding a video in the background?"

Best you can tell? What could you tell at all? You have no idea if it supports multitasking or not. I've only seen a handful of good uses for it on mobile devices, and they all seem to be around music playback while doing something else... which the Zune HD supports and I would be very surprised if WinPho7 doesnt.

2/16/2010 3:28:33 AM

So thinking the OS is ugly & awkward is sticking your head in the sand? Sorry but I agree with him. I thought MS was going to finally do something great and can't believe this is what they came up with.

Who's bright idea was it to effectively make all images larger than the screen supports so that words are cut off on main screens? Maybe I don't get it but I don't see the need for three screens of photos that are labeled "Phot", "os & V", and "ideos". Personally, that's annoying.

Why is 1/8 of the screen (right side) useless? Everyone else uses that space effectively so why couldn't MS?

The non-uniform icons are great, as are the use of your own photos & the "live" icons. The "standard" icons that are not photos are kinda ugly though imo. I'm assuming that this will be something that you can change though. I'm not a huge fan of the "flatness" of everything either but that's another aesthetic that may be changeable.

I also love the way that you basically try to ridicule him for saying that about multitasking and then go on and basically say that you think it's mostly useless anyway and "you'd be surprised" if it wasn't included. Most of the tech blogs are saying the same thing as him about multi-tasking and your assumption is no better than his unless you've had some involvement in this or have some other inside info. Typically, I think most of the people here that give you a hard time about MS support are stretching it a bit but that post seems to be pretty fanboy-ish.

2/16/2010 7:37:40 AM

i think the home screen needs a whole shit-ton of polish, but the concept is alright

the individual apps and transitions are nice enough though

Quote :

"Why is 1/8 of the screen (right side) useless? Everyone else uses that space effectively so why couldn't MS?"

and yeah, that is pretty damn dumb

[Edited on February 16, 2010 at 7:57 AM. Reason : i actually like the giant words]

2/16/2010 7:55:54 AM

Quote :

"Sticking your head in the sand while the world passes you by must be pretty fun."

Do you get kick backs for defending overrated products or do they require employees to wear blinders?

It looks smooth and fast but it just doesn't look practical and useful as a cellphone OS. I'd take android any day.

[Edited on February 16, 2010 at 8:27 AM. Reason : ]

2/16/2010 8:27:02 AM

Quote :

"Best you can tell? What could you tell at all? You have no idea if it supports multitasking or not. I've only seen a handful of good uses for it on mobile devices, and they all seem to be around music playback while doing something else... which the Zune HD supports and I would be very surprised if WinPho7 doesnt."

I'm going to agree with Noen here. I've not been shy about posting how much I dislike a number of things about the iPhone, but the "lack of multitasking" isn't really a huge issue anymore. Nowadays, like he said, the biggest "multitasking" issue is that outside of the iPod you can't use an app just for audio while using another app because of how segmented the device is. So while I can listen to the latest hot jamz from my iPod and play a game, I can't listen to Pandora or the This American Life app and do it. It's frustrating, but outside of that push notifications have taken care of a lot of the other issues. AIM doesn't need to be "running" in order for me to get an IM and Sportacular doesn't need to be "running" for me to get a sports score update. The only times lately that the lack of multitasking has been an issue is when I'm playing a game, need to check something quickly, and then have to relaunch the game. Compared to other dumb things the iPhone does, that one is sort of a drop in the bucket.

Going back to the whole "re-encoding a video in the background" thing -- is that something that people actually do? I've never owned a Windows Mobile phone.

To be honest, I'm pretty excited to see this thing in action and where it'll be when it's actually released. Direct tie in to the Zune store, wireless syncing, and categorization are all pretty exciting. It also seems to be moving away from the way Apple has their iPhone structured where you can't really hook apps into core functionality of the OS.

2/16/2010 8:46:56 AM

Quote :

"hook apps into core functionality of the OS"

This is what I am most excited about, so I am going to keep watching this phone to see if its a contender.

I want to be able to develop for my phone, easily.

2/16/2010 9:04:34 AM

seems like it will be worth checking out. it should be time for me to get a new phone by the time this is released so i will be happy to have another viable phone option.

2/16/2010 10:27:00 AM

They talked about carriers and device makers being able to add additional hubs, but i wonder if that will be something regular devs can do as well. One hub that might be worth adding might be a news/internet hub with things like RSS feeds and maybe other stuff that people commonly do on web pages. Maybe even forums posting (lmao). Go into the forum tab on internet hub and see the latest tdub posts and reply from there. I really like the concept behind the hubs of getting people out of descrete applications and moving to content aggrigation. There are alot of web pages that have their own iphone apps (amazon,bing,imdb,pizzahut,etc...) and maybe putting them into a hub instead of either having them as webpages in the browser or separate applications would be a good idea. idk.

The hubs are a really goddamn good idea and being able to do stuff like integrate AIM directly into the person hub as a messaging provider is 1000000x better than a separate aim application.

2/16/2010 10:36:57 AM

Quote :

"So thinking the OS is ugly & awkward is sticking your head in the sand? Sorry but I agree with him. I thought MS was going to finally do something great and can't believe this is what they came up with. Who's bright idea was it to effectively make all images larger than the screen supports so that words are cut off on main screens? Maybe I don't get it but I don't see the need for three screens of photos that are labeled "Phot", "os & V", and "ideos". Personally, that's annoying. Why is 1/8 of the screen (right side) useless? Everyone else uses that space effectively so why couldn't MS? "

Yes. Because it isn't ugly or awkward. You guys are regurgitating the EXACT same shit that the Luddites said when the Zune HD came out. What you are saying isn't new, it's uninformed and a kneejerk reaction to something different (notice that different != ugly or awkward).

Go down to a electronics store and play with a Zune HD. It has the same interface principles, the same interactions. Then tell me its still ugly and awkward. Because it isn't. The Zune interface is fucking gorgeous and intuitive.

I will agree that the demos they showed off on the prototypes could use a healthy dose of speedup on the animations for transitions, but we are talking about a demo that is still nearly a year from release.

You also make the classic mistake that empty space = wasted space. Which is again entirely not true. Putting more shit into every nook and cranny doesn't make for a better design, it just means there's more shit to deal with.

2/16/2010 11:05:38 AM

It will be interesting to see if the data centric model catches on with people. It will probably catch on with geeks, and certainly works for certain concepts (i.e. seeing "updates" from all of your contact's various social networks in one place) but it breaks the action/task orientation that most people have. When people do something they take an action on a piece of data, in the computer world we try to make them choose some data and then select the action to perform on that data (in some cases, in others it's action oriented), which is one of the mental hurdles that some people have when it comes to computers.

The iPhone, Android phones and before them Palms and their clones all try to get back to the action model. You chose to make a phone call, and then choose the person you want to call. Unfortunately there is still a large disconnect between data and the tasks, and this model breaks for actual data management tasks like changing contact data or adding new contacts, where unless you want a separate app for every action, or a separate app for each contact, you need a central "contacts" type app, which isn't directly connected to the action of "add a number for John Doe". Obviously the windows phone is taking a different approach, and it will be interesting to see how it translates to a phone/multi purpose device.

As to why they may not be including user level multitasking, probably for some of the same reasons Apple doesn't, because they don't want apps like this to be considered useful or even necessary:
http://www.precentral.net/reboot-schedule-homebrew-app-does-reboots-your-schedule

[Edited on February 16, 2010 at 11:29 AM. Reason : multitask]

2/16/2010 11:27:03 AM

Quote :

"you need a central "contacts" type app, which isn't directly connected to the action of "add a number for John Doe". Obviously the windows phone is taking a different approach, and it will be interesting to see how it translates to a phone/multi purpose device."

This is exactly the approach the Windows Phone is using. It's using context hubs that group tasks by their context. It just happens that there is a nice overlap of context and content type to make things easier on users. I agree it'll be interesting to see how well it works in practice, but if it works anything like the Zune does for music and video, I'm not worried in the slightest.

2/16/2010 11:35:11 AM

When you look at what applications people want to multitask on the iphone its always content applications. They want to be able to read facebook and twitter and gmail and listen to pandora all at the same time because they're used to it on their computer. For those specific applications, multitasking them on an iphone probably wouldn't be a big deal from a performance hit. Despite that the iphone's hard wall between one application and another and one application and the os makes running multiple applications at once the only solution to access mutliple content sources at once.

Winmo7 handles it way better by allowing the content to be slotted into existing applications. Removing the need for multitasking at all. All the folks all butt hurt about no multitasking (assuming there isn't multitasking which we still dont know) dont realize that the things they're multitasking now in winmo 6.5 or the things the want to multitask on the iphone, wont require multitasking at all in winmo7.

I think once people realize that its not the facebook app they're after, but the data in the facebook app they'll understand they dont need multiple descrete apps or multitasking and that winmo7 is a much better idea. I wouldn't be suprised to see android start doing the same thing, but i dont think apple will ever allow 3rd party apps to talk to the OS components.

[Edited on February 16, 2010 at 11:43 AM. Reason : .]

2/16/2010 11:43:14 AM

Quote :

"Yes. Because it isn't ugly or awkward. You guys are regurgitating the EXACT same shit that the Luddites said when the Zune HD came out. What you are saying isn't new, it's uninformed and a kneejerk reaction to something different (notice that different != ugly or awkward). Go down to a electronics store and play with a Zune HD. It has the same interface principles, the same interactions. Then tell me its still ugly and awkward. Because it isn't. The Zune interface is fucking gorgeous and intuitive. I will agree that the demos they showed off on the prototypes could use a healthy dose of speedup on the animations for transitions, but we are talking about a demo that is still nearly a year from release. You also make the classic mistake that empty space = wasted space. Which is again entirely not true. Putting more shit into every nook and cranny doesn't make for a better design, it just means there's more shit to deal with."

I've played with a Zune HD and I think it's a nice device. That doesn't mean that I don't find the menu & layout of WinMo7 ugly. Last time I checked, there wasn't a universal definition of ugly or attractive. I'd prefer some depth to the icons & lettering. I'm assuming this is the same screen as the Zune HD so show it off some. The font is great (but I still think it's too big, I'd much prefer if it scrolled automatically or was just plain smaller). I also didn't say it was awkward but I definitely wouldn't say that some people don't find it as such. Also, for the record, I was highly supportive of the Zune HD until recently when there has been pretty much no development for it. I would have bought one if it could do a bit more and dealt with the annoyance of running the software on a VM or bootcamp.

Empty space is not always wasted space but I don't see how you can possibly justify that when you're dealing with a ~3.2" screen on a phone. They made the headings 12" long. Are you trying to tell me that they couldn't make the icons a tiny bit bigger to fit slightly more info/picture/font size? It's wasted space. There is as much justification (at this point) for it here as there is for it on my tv.

-----------------

Re: multi-tasking, I think MS would be wise to put some kind of limit on the multi-tasking. Anyone that has had a WinMo phone before knows how much trouble it can cause with battery life and overall lag. They definitely have to do something to allow some apps to run in the background (whether it be through core app updating rather than individual apps) though with all the media hoopla over it. Verizon & Android have brought it close to the forefront with recent advertisements. Personally, if an app will save my info/location & restart quickly then I don't think there's much of a need for it outside of music & maybe IM (though I don't typically use it on my android phone or old BB).

Also, where do these "hubs" exist? Are they cloud-based apps? They were always shown in full size like they're going to be accessed by computer but I haven't actually seen anything explaining how they're used other than they're not a part of the Zune desktop client (whatever it's called).

2/16/2010 9:26:16 PM

Hubs are just what they call the core apps that handle certain types of data. For example where you have contacts on a normal phone, you have the people hub on winmo7. Contacts are usually static lists of people with general info (pic,email,phone# etc...) the people hub extends that by adding live data from external sources. So one tab in people might have the basic info like contacts, but the next tab has the last updates from facebook or twitter or whatever. Instead of needing a 3rd party app for facebook, the facebook app integrates into the people hub. Whereas on an iphone push apps get delivered to the facebook app and then you open the facebook app to view them, on winmo7 the facebook app is not so much an app, but a plugin that recieves the same push notification and then updates the data right there in the people hub.

I guess you could think of Hubs as core applications built into winmo7 that can get updates to their content via 3rd party plugins. In this way you get the same data you'd get from a 3rd party app, but you eliminate the need for a separate app outside of the hub. This eliminates the need for multitasking while giving the user access to multiple data sources that would require multitasking on other OSes.

2/16/2010 9:34:08 PM

I must have used the wrong word. I thought it was hubs but maybe not. I'm talking about when they had the phone on the left side of the stage and on the right side was the full view of whatever was on the phone. I thought I read that these pages were where you added your information, music, videos, etc. Since they're shown full size (as would be seen on a full monitor), I assumed that they're accessed outside of the phone. Maybe they were just showing what didn't fit on the screen & everything is drag & drop but that seems a bit more unlikely with today's idiot consumers.

Also, the updating core apps are great. I have android and I love that feature BUT I don't have (and don't want) everyone on facebook in my contacts. Therefore, I have an actual use for the facebook app. The nice thing about that is that whenever I use that app and then hit the home button, it's still where I left off when I open it up later. IMO, that's the only use for multi-tasking outside of music and that can be easily accomplished by having a "memory" for each app.

2/16/2010 9:41:24 PM

well the way it would work in the hub is your facebook account would pull your facebook list + their contact data into the people list on your winmo7 phone. I could see where someone might want to keep them separate, but you can probably sort/filter them by source like you can with email accounts.

As to the first question im not quite sure. Each hub has about 4 or 5 "tabs" and you can only see one at a time. THey may have just had a graphic that expanded so you can see the full view, and what each tab looks like on the phone, to provide a better idea of how it works.

is this what you're talking about?

2/16/2010 9:47:59 PM

Looking back through it, I guess it is what I saw. I had someone's coverage of the live event up and that's just not how I remember it being shown but looking back at gizmodo's story, I think that's all it is. So I guess that means that everything is going to be set up in phone somewhat like android. I wonder if this means that music & movies are going to be handled through the zune desktop software.

As for app syncing, I guess I'll just have to see it. I've got 150 or so people and treading through them on my phone to see what a couple of them are up to isn't how I would prefer to handle it. If it'll let you choose specific ones to ignore always, that would be sufficient I think.

2/16/2010 10:01:52 PM

Quote :

"Empty space is not always wasted space but I don't see how you can possibly justify that when you're dealing with a ~3.2" screen on a phone. They made the headings 12" long. Are you trying to tell me that they couldn't make the icons a tiny bit bigger to fit slightly more info/picture/font size? It's wasted space. There is as much justification (at this point) for it here as there is for it on my tv."

Because more information crammed into a tiny screen != better. Those long heading give you spacial anchor points so you can see your relative position in a hub. Sure they could have made everything 6pt font and 16px icons. If you want that, there's Windows Mobile 6.5 already out there.

The phone is not a PC. The tv is not a PC. The tendency to want to cram as much as you can into any given screen is a distinctly PC phenomenon (and even PC applications are moving away from this).

I would challenge you to tell me what advantage your suggestions would give other than just having "more" on the screen? By keeping the number smaller you have much better spacial memory, larger space for ambient information presentation (aka those animations and notifications on the icons themselves), the large headings provide spacial anchoring, and providing the blank space reinforces the interaction model (flow versus screens).

If you like the Zune HD, I fail to see how you can categorically dislike WinPho7 since the latter is the next generation of the former experience. We all know that the Zune interface works and works well, so why all of a sudden will the extension of that to people and communication NOT?

Quote :

"I'd prefer some depth to the icons & lettering."

Apple will be happy to help you with all the candybar/jelly buttons you like. Icons are flat, why fake them to look 3D? This is definitely a case of personal taste, but I quite like the idea of authentic visuals (2d interface, 2d visuals) as a change to the last 10 years of pseudo-3D Photoshop effects. Less fluff, more substance. Everything is so much more legible and recognizable at a glance (to me) when you get rid of all the fluff around it.

Quote :

"Also, for the record, I was highly supportive of the Zune HD until recently when there has been pretty much no development for it. I would have bought one if it could do a bit more and dealt with the annoyance of running the software on a VM or bootcamp."

Totally agree with you there. I'm definitely hoping that with the phone, it will translate back to the Zune (like the iPhone/iPod touch interoperability). I really wish Microsoft had done more with the marketplace and developer support on the Zune last year, but I can see why they chose to wait now.

2/16/2010 10:07:33 PM

check this out
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone/archive/2010/02/15/windows-phone-7-series-show-and-tell.aspx

the guy demoing it has his facebook acount set up and it has 600 people. I imagine they'll probably add a way to filter it by network source.

as far as movies and videos go, they'll have the zune marketplace so you can get stuff from there wirelessly or via the zune software. For something like pandora, it integrates into the zune music library the same as any other music. Its a plugin to the zune hub like facebook is a plugin to the people hub. That means all the standard player controls can control pandora and you can listen to it in the background without need a separate pandora app. Also, the zune hd is a simple mass storage device and i bet winmo7 will be to, so you can just drag stuff onto it via explorer.

2/16/2010 10:13:24 PM

Awesome

(I say this based on your post, as I haven't watched the video yet)

2/16/2010 10:31:36 PM

They dont mention pandora in that one, but they do here:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowsphone/videoGallery.aspx?contentID=mobileworldcongress2010

altho you get the idea. Instead of descrete apps you use plugins to extend the core apps.

[Edited on February 16, 2010 at 10:37 PM. Reason : .]

2/16/2010 10:32:54 PM

Quote :

"Because more information crammed into a tiny screen != better. Those long heading give you spacial anchor points so you can see your relative position in a hub. Sure they could have made everything 6pt font and 16px icons. If you want that, there's Windows Mobile 6.5 already out there. The phone is not a PC. The tv is not a PC. The tendency to want to cram as much as you can into any given screen is a distinctly PC phenomenon (and even PC applications are moving away from this). "

From the live event: "Three screens and a cloud. The PC, now mobile. We hope 7 is our lucky number!". It appears that someone disagrees with you.

Also, you're stating exactly what MS did. I specifically said that they could have made the font larger. They could have done a lot of stuff without cluttering the screen anymore. Sticking all the information on the left half of the screen doesn't meant that it's not crowded or cluttered. It just means that there's a big dead space on the right side of the screen. I thought you worked in UI some? How the hell can you tell me that shifting everything in MS' ribbon over so that there's an extra 1/8 free is more efficient than how it is now? LARGER icons, LARGER font, LARGER photos would ALL make the EXACT SAME information EASIER TO SEE. Please explain to me how my experience is supposed to be heightened by having a screen that is roughly 1/8 too large and so pointless that the UI doesn't use it. Why the hell does it even exist?

As for the rest of it, it's my opinion. I don't care about "candybar/jelly" icons but that doesn't mean that they have to be plain white font. Gradients, alternate colors, or shadows would all add something for my personal taste. Adobe's icons are a good example of this. They're 2D squares with 2 letters on them but they have a small gradient on them that keeps them from looking like something that my nephew made in preschool. With the Zune, it's not something that I use constantly every day so I can deal with not having a UI that is perfectly to my taste. A phone is a MUCH larger part of my life than any kind of pmp and I don't want to see something that is not to my taste each time I pull it from my pocket. That's one of the reasons that I went with an Eris over the Droid. Anyway, I'm sure it'll only be a matter of time before the icons & appearance can be changed into something that fits my tastes better. I really don't see that part of it as a big issue. I was just pointing out that I agreed with the other guy and that I felt "head in the sand" was a pretty far fetched statement/accusation for a personal dislike.

2/16/2010 10:58:47 PM

So is the Windows Phone going to push apps the same way the iPhone has?

2/17/2010 4:31:48 AM

i honestly think that if they bring the Windows 7 Series to Verizon it will be huge.... along with app/marketplace development.

but from one of the videos it sounds like they are waiting for another dev conference coming up in the next month to announce something else.

here it is:
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/wmdev/archive/2010/02/15/windows-phone-7-series-going-big-for-developers-at-mix10.aspx

coming holiday 2010

homepage:
http://www.windowsphone7series.com/

[Edited on February 17, 2010 at 9:05 PM. Reason : .]

2/17/2010 9:02:15 PM

and let me just say that show & tell video is TOTALLY worth watching... these phones are gonna be sweet, particularly if you're a zune subscriber:

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone/archive/2010/02/15/windows-phone-7-series-show-and-tell.aspx

[Edited on February 17, 2010 at 9:45 PM. Reason : ,]

2/17/2010 9:18:14 PM