Windows Phone 7 Slammed as a Disastrous Waste of Time And Money
Up to today, Microsoft had managed to keep the Kin's failure and early termination largely separate from the discussion over Windows Phone 7. According to Redmond, the Kin was neither fish nor fowl; it wasn't Windows Phone 7, but it wasn't Windows Mobile 6.5 either. After Microsoft's WP7 demos at Mobile Beat this year, that's no longer possible. According to Infoworld, WP7 "will be a failure...Windows Phone 7 is a waste of time and money. It's a platform that no carrier, device maker, developer, or user should bother with. Microsoft should kill it before it ships and admit that it's out of the mobile game for good. It is supposed to ship around Christmas 2010, but anyone who gets one will prefer a lump of coal. I really mean that."
That's a startlingly strong attack from a major IT publication on an OS that hasn't shipped yet, but the information provided is fairly damning. We already know Windows Phone 7 won't support multitasking (only MS's first-party apps are allowed to multitasking.) There's no copy-paste functionality, the UI isn't well integrated, and apps can't cross-communicate. The OS's features and browser, meanwhile, are equally weak. The current WP7 browser is "Internet Explorer 7, with some IE8 capabilities added." That means no HTML5 and no hardware acceleration ala IE9.
We aren't sure even Zune guy can save this OS.
The more information that leaks out, the more Windows Phone 7 sounds like a kludged-together mess. With NVIDIA pushing Tegra and phones generally evolving towards more advanced UIs, you'd think Microsoft would prioritize the sort of hardware acceleration that could give its phones a distinct edge compared to the competition. Instead, it sounds like the Kin debacle was much more indicative of what we should expect from WP7 than Microsoft wants to admit.
That's a startlingly strong attack from a major IT publication on an OS that hasn't shipped yet, but the information provided is fairly damning. We already know Windows Phone 7 won't support multitasking (only MS's first-party apps are allowed to multitasking.) There's no copy-paste functionality, the UI isn't well integrated, and apps can't cross-communicate. The OS's features and browser, meanwhile, are equally weak. The current WP7 browser is "Internet Explorer 7, with some IE8 capabilities added." That means no HTML5 and no hardware acceleration ala IE9.
We aren't sure even Zune guy can save this OS.
The more information that leaks out, the more Windows Phone 7 sounds like a kludged-together mess. With NVIDIA pushing Tegra and phones generally evolving towards more advanced UIs, you'd think Microsoft would prioritize the sort of hardware acceleration that could give its phones a distinct edge compared to the competition. Instead, it sounds like the Kin debacle was much more indicative of what we should expect from WP7 than Microsoft wants to admit.
