Windows Mobile Team on video tour

[Colin Dunstan]

Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble visited the Windows Mobile group where he interviewed product manager Ford Davidson and a bunch of other geeks about WM 5.0 and all the other sweet things these guys have in their pockets. Fortunately Scobleizer didn't forget to record his trip and to make the 45mins video available to us mere mortals (see screenshots). Among the things we learn is

• that XBox games such as Midtown Madness are being ported to Windows Mobile 5.0;
• that developers can integrate MS Media player into their own application (Picard, do you read this?);
• why .NET is better than Java;
• that an OEM needs 60-90 days to bring a phone out;
• that MS guys even run POST-5.0 versions of WM which they don't want to share which us;
• that MS is planning to release a theme maker;
• why WM fonts are better readable than fonts on Treos and Blackberries;
• how the police uses PDAs for face recognizition;
• that airport cameras are scanning faces and broadcasting matches to the PDAs of agents;
• why softkeys for PDAs are hot;
• that Ford does know how to blow up a HTC Universal flash.

Download link to the video (WMV, 170Mb).

[via Microsoft's Channel 9]

[hacker]

This all sounds like "Nyah nyah, we still think we're better than you..." to me. Unfortunately, for them, they're not.

Personally its all well and good, but until they put a proper, non-desktop UI on their devices, and make it compatible with the other platforms out there (i.e. OSX, Linux, using standards), then it will die on the vine like other niche technologies.

No phone, smartphone or otherwise, should depend on the operating system running on a desktop to function at full capacity. My Nokia and Motorola phones certainly do not, and their OS is far superior in usability to this Microsoft "Play-Doh".

Edit: After fetching the video, it becomes even more clear that Windows Mobile is heading the wrong direction.

• DirectX and real-time networked games... on a phone?
• Using an onboard GPS to "track assets"? (i.e. figure out where all of your employees are at any one time, using Microsoft Location Server to zoom in and plot it by address, business and location)?
• Always-on, downloading-in-the-background, capabilities? Not unless I can disable it, and select when and where and what times these bits of data are downloaded
• Remotely disable/wipe the phone? (only available when using Exchange 5 with SP2 of course).
• RSS feeds? Come on, we've had that on PDAs for 2+ years now already. (And he specifically mentioned this capability in IE7, as if it wasn't already a feature in Firefox/Mozilla/Safari that they simply ripped off and rebranded as "News Caching").

They're playing catch-up, and they know it.

For the privacy advocate, Windows Mobile 5.0 screams RUN!

I heard nothing at all about the quality of the phones themselves. I don't care about having a 1gb SD card or a 3gb microdrive in my phone.

• How well does it work as a phone?
• What about the PIM capabilities? Can I beam a contact to my Palm, transparently?
• Does it work with anything but Microsoft products? (hint: No.)
• What about battery life? They danced right around that question when asked and jumped right back to the "Ooo, but look at the shiny things!" OCD.

Instead of broadening their market, they're collapsing it by making the devices depend on very specific versions of very specific software packages.

Dead end. Yes, I'm being pessimistic, but not everyone wants a "desktop" in a phone, and certainly not one that loses 80% of its capabilities if you don't run the complementary Microsoft Windows desktop operating system.

Show me that it works as a phone, connects and communicates with my existing devices using standards-compliant protocols, in a way that doesn't enforce a specific version of a specific application running on a specific desktop operating system, and I'll consider it.

[TadW]

Originally Posted by hacker

I heard nothing at all about the quality of the phones themselves. I don't care about having a 1gb SD card or a 3gb microdrive in my phone.

Well observed. Scobleizer guy asked several times about battery life but the WM dudes avoided an answer. Still, I am positively surprised. It's not "normal" for Microsoft to grant inside looks into their company. And that Eric Engineer guy was hilarious. I think he's a real nerd.

[Laurens]

The guy at the start and the end didn't have much to say and he didn't look very comfortable either. The middle part with the "Eric Engineer" guy and his manager was great, though.

The question about battery life was stupid to begin with: as anyone knows, this depends on the hardware configuration and the actual usage (i.e. playing MP3/video, brightness settings, etc.) There's no way the guy could've answered this. At least he tried to give an impression.

[hacker]

Originally Posted by Laurens

The guy at the start and the end didn't have much to say and he didn't look very comfortable either.

I got the impression that he just kept flipping into "Marketing Mode" every time he opened his mouth. The other annoying thing was his use of "teenage" words.. "Cool!" "Awesome" "Neat", and whatever else. Come on, you're a product manager, talk in terms people understand. People don't buy $500 phones because they're "Cool" or "Awesome", they buy them (and it truly is an investment), because they solve a problem that they have.

The question about battery life was stupid to begin with: as anyone knows, this depends on the hardware configuration and the actual usage (i.e. playing MP3/video, brightness settings, etc.) There's no way the guy could've answered this. At least he tried to give an impression.

I completely disagree. He dodged the question about the power consumption and battery life with his "bluetooth on the plane" answers.

He said it lasted the whole flight to San Diego. From where? Los Angeles? Chicago? France? Were you typing on it the whole time? Or did you just have it "On" in your tray? A completely useless answer that gives zero indication of actual battery life. Besides, at that altitude (assuming more than a 45-minute hop), your phone isn't polling for towers, causing more battery life to get sucked out of it. Did he turn off the phone piece and just leave it as a portable doc-writing tool?

Not enough information to be useful.

My Nokia 3650 lasts about 5 days on standby (bluetooth headset about 3 days on standby), on a chiclet-thin battery wafer. Does the next generation phone last 1/3 as much, because it has "active background polling" on all the time and bluetooth and a faster processor and higher dpi screen and 3D games and so on? If so, I don't want it, and I'd wager to guess most other people don't either. You're not always within an hour of a charging cradle, so unless it can last a full day on one single charge, it is still satisfying a niche market.

[Laurens]

Originally Posted by hacker

I completely disagree. He dodged the question about the power consumption and battery life with his "bluetooth on the plane" answers.

He said it lasted the whole flight to San Diego. From where? Los Angeles? Chicago? France? Were you typing on it the whole time? Or did you just have it "On" in your tray? A completely useless answer that gives zero indication of actual battery life.

Then what kind of answer did you expect? Did you really think the guy would sit there with a stopwatch, keeping track of what exactly he was doing with a testing unit on a plane trip? He didn't duck the question, he simply didn't have an answer.

Battery life depends primarily on the hardware configuration, battery, screen brightness and the actual usage. My iPAQ lasts way longer than my Zire72, even with WiFi on. Does that mean PPC is more power-efficient than PalmOS? Of course not! You're barking up the wrong tree here. Don't expect a software guy to give you any meaningful answer. Ask the hardware vendor instead. (And even then don't expect an accurate answer.)

[Laurens]

That HTC device with the swivel screen looked pretty cool, BTW. Not sure about its durability, though.