I’m heading to New York City today to take part in the Pink event, which you’ve heard about. As I write this, I’m amused to still see stories appearing like, “Microsoft may unveil new phones today.” Yeah. They may. :)
Anyway, I actually don’t know too much about Pink so there are no worries about me violating any NDAs or whatever. I can’t discuss exactly where I’m headed today, that’s about it.
I am a bit confused about how these phones fit in Microsoft’s broader strategy, and I’m not positive “because we needed a new version of Sidekick” fully answers that question. That said, I’m eager to see the devices and, hopefully, get some logical explanations about what’s going on.
If you’re interested in following along, Microsoft will be webcasting the Pink announcement on its Press Pass site. It starts at 1:00 pm ET/11:00 am PT.
Hint: You can see a Pink phone in the first image at the top of that page. :) It’s a slider phone with a hardware keyboard.
Just a little speculation here, but perhaps “Pink” is Microsoft’s attempt at a dumb-phone, er, I mean “feature-phone” operating-system. They’re going after the high-end with WP7, maybe they’re going to take on the low-end with Pink.
There’s a big opportunity there. Dumb-phones are usually pretty terrible, running crappy OSes unique to whatever manufacturers makes the phone, despite the fact that Samsung, Motorola, and LG have no business writing software. These terrible phones make up the majority of handset sales, mostly because not everyone can afford a $70+ monthly bill for a real smartphone.
If Pink can successfully target the talk-and-text-and-Twitter crowd, it could be a big deal. If that’s their plan, then I don’t really think that it muddles the message about WP7 at all.
I do believe it to be a feature phone, yeah.
This is exactly what I’m expecting. But a feature phone IMO is a bit more than your average dumb phone. If it looks good, does what people expect, and has a low price then verizon (and whoever else later on) could be selling quite a lot of them.
This might be one of those sleeper hits. While we’re all busy talking about iPhone, WP7 and Android, who knows how many millions of these they could sell?
It would be funny if these new phones are not phones… maybe they are just messaging only devices… something that will run twitter, facebook, sms, and chat but not have actual phone service… how often do younger people call each other anyway…
A messaging only device would be a non-starter surely? “Younger people” occationally look our from under their hair and make phone calls :)
“occationally look our from under their hair”
now thats funny!
Believe it or not, there is a market for such things. If I wasn’t a software developer and looking to work with WP7, this phone would be fine for me. I don’t need, nor care about, having a full featured phone … I only want something that makes phone calls.
I was pretty confused about this whole Pink thing as well. After-all, Microsoft is trying to play up the Windows Phone experience, right? So, why throw in this other feature specific phone on top of it. I don’t think I’ll be too overly excited about this release. For now, I’m looking forward to Windows Phone, but Microsoft Pink is still a Microsoft product, so I’ll still want to check it out, I guess.
Wow, didn’t realize it was already 1:30, guess I missed the webcast. Hopefully they’ll allow us to watch it after the fact, as they usually do.