Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Phone 7 will be a “disaster” that’s not worth your time, InfoWorld said after spending some time with it in a hands-on demo.
Some of us at IntoMobile (mostly me, though) are cautiously optimistic about Windows Phone 7 and the lust-worthy hardware it’s going to be on. Writer Galen Gruman pulls no punches after sitting in on a developer session at MobileBeat 2010, though.
No caveats now: 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.
In particular, he rips into the new Windows Phone 7 UI. This is called “Metro” and it moves away from the icons-in-a-grid interface that the iPhone and Android use and opts for a tile or hub interface that apps can interact with. The problem with this, Gruman said, is that it gets clunky and cluttered when you want to associate multiple apps with a hub.
He also doesn’t think the lack of multitasking, IE8 and the lack of copy and pasting will hamper the platform to developers. We just saw the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 developer tools hit the wild and I’ve already heard from developers that the platform is still very, very immature.
To put it lightly, Gruman doesn’t like Microsoft Windows Phone 7.
The bottom line is this: Windows Phone 7 is a pale imitation of the 2007-era iPhone. It’s as if Microsoft decided in summer 2007 to copy the iPhone and has shut its developers in a bunker ever since, so they don’t realize that several years have passed, that the iPhone has advanced, and that competitors such as Google Android and Palm WebOS have also pushed the needle forward.
Sigh. Let’s hope he’s wrong because a strong Microsoft in the mobile space would make the other guys up their game.
[Via InfoWorld]