When I saw the early press coming out this morning about Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7), I was absolutely stunned.  I expected a device that merged the current Windows Mobile platform (6.5) with a lot of concepts from the Zune HD and Xbox 360.   But, WP7 was actually a complete rewrite of the whole platform.  In every sense, it is a brand new mobile OS based on the Zune HD and XBox 360.  What is even more impressive, is that the new platform seems to borrow little from the current mobile market leaders—the Apple iPhone, Blackberry OS, and Android.  In fact, it eschews the current paradigm that a mobile OS is simply a gateway to your apps.  Rather than apps, WP7 focuses on hubs for content.  Each hub (people, pictures, media, games, marketplace, etc.) actively polls social media and pulls in content relevant to that hub.  For example, if I want to to view a contact on the device, I just click on their name and it automagically pulls in their recent Facebook, Twitter, and (hopefully) Flickr information and aggregates it into a single view.  And, based on the early walk-throughs, this works contextually for every hub.

Now that I have had a little time to digest all the news and watch a few videos, I am still pretty amazed that this product came from Microsoft.  Not because the UI is  so good (MS has recently came out with a number of good  UIs), but because the new UI is such a huge risk.  I honestly expected Microsoft to go the Bada route, and just come out with an iPhone clone.  This would have been a safe choice.  And, based on how bad Bada is getting panned, a fairly poor choice.  But, Microsoft decided to go the other direction and come out with a highly unique, very stylized creation of its own.  And, I think that this is going to really help differentiate them in the marketplace.

While there are a number of questions remaining about WP7, I think the initial showing was extremely positive.  I know that I personally am going to put off buying a new device until the fall to see how this platform plays out.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.