Mobile Phone News :Windows Phone 7 preview

The mobile industry has become prettyvery competetive , with even the iPhone getting things hugely wrong with poor manufacturing and expecting to survive on reputation alone. Windows Phone 7 now seems to be in the …

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The mobile industry has become prettyvery competetive , with even the iPhone getting things hugely wrong with poor manufacturing and expecting to survive on reputation alone. Windows Phone 7 now seems to be in the firing line, with the Boy Genius Report and other sites ripping into the new OS. InfoWorld have called the new OS a “disaster”, The Guardian and other sources have began to jump on the bandwagon. Everybody likes to give Microsoft a boot when it’s down.

The main sources of influence are the BGR Preview, ZDNet and Engadget previews though, as a few sites and many developers appear to have got their hands on the technical preview of the new OS today.

There are some good points within the summaries though, Matt Miller (ZDNet) states.

The current experience is amazingly stable and fluid and I am quite impressed with what they have done. It has taken some time and they were pretty much out of competing for customers for most of this year, but it looks like they will come out firing with all they have this coming holiday season.

TThe BGR Preview isn’t quite so friendly (although lets remember that BGR are extremely bias and paid off to be pro apple) pointing at problems when dialling a number…

We’re not going to lie, we really have no idea how people actually let the phone app get this far. When you first launch the application, you’d except to be at the keypad, so you can actually make a call, right? No. You’re presented with the recent call history list. Just text splattered on the screen. No problem, you’ll mosey on over to settings and change the default view so the keypad shows up. Ah, problem there. You can’t make that change because it’s not an option. So to make a phone call, you have to go into the phone and hit one of the poorly-sized action buttons below to bring up the keypad to make a phone call.

The Engadget preview is now online and has some good feedback – the email interface is great, the keyboard is great, but unfortunately the concluding comments don’t sound so good.

What we’ve been presented with here doesn’t exactly feel like a complete mobile operating system in many ways. Some parts of Windows Phone 7 are more like a wireframe — an interesting design study, an example of what a next-gen phone platform could be. That’s both good and bad. On one side, we’re still really excited by the prospect of Metro as a viable, clean-slate approach to the mobile user experience, and there are lots of smart moves being made that could lead to greatness. On the other side, Microsoft has to turn this into a viable retail product that can hang with the fiercest competition in the history of the cellphone in just a few months’ time, and there are some serious issues that need to be addressed. Frankly, it’s a little scary.

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By any measure, Microsoft’s got its back against the wall in the mobile game, and becoming competitive quickly is vital to the company’s success — and in that regard, we understand why they’ve been so adamant about getting Windows Phone 7 on shelves in time for Holiday 2010. The thing is, putting out a product that’s half-baked risks alienating early adopters at the worst possible time, especially considering that we see a clear-cut (and pretty painless) path to fixing the most egregious shortcomings. Seriously, if the WP7 team put their heads down and added a clipboard and some rudimentary multitasking, Microsoft could have an exceptionally solid version-one product in Windows Phone 7 — especially when coupled with the company’s fierce outreach to developers.

The new OS isn’t finished, let’s not forget that, these are all previews at the OS as it is now, Microsoft arn’t Apple, they will perform stringent testing and have jsut added all of the Kin developers to the R & D team. Let’s also remember that early rumours are that the WP7S handsets will be among the first to use the Qualcomm Snapdragon’s 1.5 Ghz dual core processor.

In summary the previews seem to be fairly mixed, with strong improvements and positive remarks sitting next to quite harsh comments, which you should take with a pinch of salt as we all know how harsh iPhone fanboys can be.

Let us know what you think in our new look Mobile Phone Forum

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