Will Microsoft Windows Phone 7 be a disaster?

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]

About The Author

Marin Perez

Marin Perez has torture tested cell phones and smartphones for industry leaders like CNET and InformationWeek. He remembers when 4G was just a screen on PowerPoint presentations and is fascinated with the amount of innovation out there. Marin has spent a lot of time with BlackBerry and Android but he finally broke down a bought an iPhone to see what all the hype's about. He also has too many tablets.

tkj

gosh! I don't know what kind of brain they have or what kind of heart they have. I just want to tell you my opinion, WP7 will soon to be #1, and far #1.

lets talk about then.

One thing to remember: InfoWorld said the same thing to Win7! You know what kind of people they are!
Vinnie

The author of that article wrote it in hopes that painting WP7 in a negative light will get him a free bumper from Apple so he could actually make a phone call with his iPhone 4.
ddd

Whoever this "Gruman" is sounds like a completely incompetent person. The point of windows phone 7 isn't to rehash what apple and google have already done. microsoft is creating it's own unique and outstanding interface. and the point of the tiles isn't to pin every single app you have. that's why they have repeatedly said it's for what's most IMPORTANT to you. likewise there is a separate page for all your apps. and from what i've already seen windows phone 7 looks amazing. along with all the amazing devices they are lining up. please do us all a favor and keep your dim witted opinions to yourself.
marinperez

Bahahaha
marinperez

Interesting point. I didn't know that. Windows 7 rocks, I don't care what the haters say.
Joe

MS haters always say that Microsoft copies and does not innovate (I disagree but we are all entitled to our opinions) but then trashes them because WP7 UI isn't just like IPhone and Android. I read the Mis-Infoworld article and it was trash. Not liking something is fine but not trashing a product just because you don't like the company that makes it is irresponsible and unprofessional. Also, to top it off, Gruman was once a writer for MacWorld. That says it all.
SmoothD

The editor of the article was a former MacWorld editor and has had several books on Apple. I guess a little angst against MS was something he needed to get out of his system since the iPhone 4 debacle.

I find reviews helpful if the author has at least some positives and negatives about a product. Maybe more positive than negative or vice versa is typical, but his article doesn't find anything positive which is simply impossible to believe.

Here's a rebuttal to his rant http://blog.markarteaga.com/WillWindowsPhone7Succ…

WM7 is going to have certainly some innovative and new things in the product. Demos have been pretty good from what I've seen on Youtube, etc. Yes, it's a first release and has a few things that will need to be updated to reach it's full potential, but overall it's going to be a SWEET phone IMO. But that's to be seen, it's still yet to be in my actual hand to give a proper review.
Dave Kersnowski

Maybe It'll be as popular as the Zune or Kin?
WP7 is 3 years late to the party and half-baked. I've worked on WIndows Mobile projects for many years. Like many developers I'm tired of waiting for Microsoft to get its act together. They don't seem to have a clue. Developing UI with Blend is nice but I just do not think Microsoft's tile based UI will work for anything more than a demo. And now there talking about 2 business platforms one for later this year and one for 2011 using C++ for coding? And the whole no SQL CE locally for developers (or other good local data storage solution).It'll come later (like when people are using their IPhones while living on colonies on Mars?). Silverlight apps with huge latency issues (IPhone 2007). How late to the party can they be?
And in case you haven't noticed people are in love with the IPhone. It doesn't even have to work well and can drop calls and people still line up to buy it.
I wish it were different but I think Microsoft's going to take the Phone market as well as the Zune took the music player market. Microsoft has been dropping the ball in the mobile space at every opportunity for about a dozen years now. What makes people believe they won't screw it up again? Didn't they pay like $500 million for a company so they could bring us the Kin? If they cleared 100k for each one they sold they probably still wouldn't break even.
G Yeo

Great photograph to begin this story

Microsoft has an insurmountable problem. Time.

Ideally, it really should delay the release of Windows Phone 7. It's unfinished. It's immature. It's full of shortcomings. It's not ready for release. A half-baked effort will not succeed against Android or iPhone.

But the other end of the double-edged sword is that Windows Mobile is still haemorrhaging market share. Microsoft can't delay without losing relevance in mobile.

Whichever way Microsoft moves, it can't win. It's like a checkmate. Microsoft really lost the mobile game 6 years ago when it stopped putting effort into upgrading Windows Mobile. Now it is in an unwinnable position.
Richard

At the end of the day what is being described is how someone is supposed to interact with a peice of glass that has a moving picture displayed underneath it to perform particular functionality (including actually making reliable phone calls .

You either like or dislike the method of interaction and/or the the picture.

And that is opinion. Sometimes informed, sometimes predudiced. The problem is to tell one from the other.
Flash Stein

I think Microsoft has been playing catch up since the release of the first iphone. Even with the release of windows 7 phone Microsoft is still behind the 8-ball.
http://techmobileinfo.blogspot.com/
kdarling

That's one heckuva train wreck. It was so bad that even the writing on the cars got reversed!

I need to download the latest WP7 emulator and play with it some, in order to get a better handle on how it feels.
marinperez

Other previews (from more reputable writers) have a more positive take on Windows Phone 7 http://www.intomobile.com/2010/07/19/microsoft-wi…