As the clock ticks down, more and more information about Windows Phone becomes public, which makes my life a lot easier. I’ve been balancing my desire to be transparent here on the Windows Phone Secrets blog with my need to honor non-disclosure agreements regarding what I’ve discovered during my hands-on time with Windows Phone and in the handful of meetings I’ve had with the Windows Phone team over the past few months. Anyway, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about whether Microsoft’s MyPhone service would move ahead with Windows Phone, whether there were any plans for KIN-like web service functionality on the phone, and so on. This announcement should answer some of those questions. But it also provides an interesting platform for something I’ve been wanting to communicate for a while now.
Some pertinent bits (from my perspective, writing the book):
The Music + Videos hub draw upon the beautiful Zune software.
I’ve been waiting to discuss this in a bit more detail. I had asked some time back whether that hub was called "Zune" or "Music + Videos." It’s the latter. And Zune is basically an application/service that’s exposed inside that hub, in one of the columns (called sections). Other applications/services can also be exposed via this hub, and will. For example, Microsoft has sometimes shown off/discussed how the Pandora service will do this.
Windows Phone 7 will connect with Zune software on the PC through Wi-Fi to access and manage music, video, high-resolution photos and other large file content.
Just as Zune does. It works.
The Office hub brings together the powerful Office suite we all know and love: OneNote, Word, PowerPoint, and even SharePoint server integration.
But not (real) SkyDrive integration, which makes no sense to me given the consumer focus of the phone. You can, however, browse to the SkyDrive web site in IE, open a word doc, choose Download, and get it on the phone.
A feature we’re discussing for the first time today is the new Windows Phone Live companion site that gives people a central place to see pictures they’ve published, view their Windows Live calendar and contacts, exchange OneNote files and access other information shared between the phone and the Web. The site will offer 25GB of SkyDrive and host the Find My Phone service, which allows people to find and manage a missing phone with map, ring, lock and erase capabilities right from your PC – and all for free.
I need to ask about whether I can discuss this in any detail yet, but let’s just say for now it’s part of Windows Live and looks/works as you’d expect. When you think about how MyPhone was sort of a pedestrian but free version of Apple’s MobileMe, this kind of turns it up a notch.
During initial availability, Windows Phone 7 will support 5 languages; English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. The Windows Phone Marketplace will support the buying and selling of applications in 17 countries; Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, UK and United States.
Interesting, and news to me.
The bottom line is that we believe it’s not enough to have exciting games, intuitive email, rich music, extensive social networking tools or even beautiful hardware to house it all. The magic comes when all of these things work together to bring the people and things you care about closer, while smoothing out your everyday tasks so that your day is a little bit easier. That’s what you’ll see from Microsoft this holiday; connected entertainment that’s bigger than any single screen.
I don’t want to pull a Robert Scoble here. But you can look over 15 years of my writing and not find an example of this, so what the heck. I’ve had two near-tear-inducing moments related to technology this year, as lame as that sounds on the surface. The first was during the iPhone 4 launch when Steve Jobs showed off the video of the deaf couple signing over FaceTime; my son is deaf, and while he doesn’t sign (he has cochlear implants), his deafness is the result of a near-death experience when he was one, and … well, it’s still a tough one for me. I guess it always will be. The Apple thing was calculated to get a response. It did.
The second one, seriously, was Windows Phone. When you see this thing light up with not just all of your stuff, but also all of the stuff (i.e. photos, feed updates) from your friends, family, and other acquaintances, and do so dynamically and automatically and in real time, simply by signing onto Windows Live, it’s … God help me … magical. It just is. It’s amazing. And it kills whatever’s going on iPhone, Android, whatever. It’s awe-inspiring.
There, I said it. I have to live with it. But when marketing guys like Jobs toss around terms like "revolutionary" and "magical" far too casually, it’s a bit irritating. Especially when you know that the real revolution and magic is on the way, and has nothing to do with Apple at all.
Stay tuned. Windows Phone is going to blow you away.
Got agree with you complete here. Having looked at all that WP7 is trying to do, it doesn’t even come close to the what my Android does or iPhone previously.
I can’t wait to get my hands on an actual device.
I just can’t wait :D – Selling my 2 year old HTC Touch Diamond on Win Mob 6.1 and replacing it with any of the Windows Phone 7 devices :D
I am so glad that the kin studio-like service will be coming to WP7. Even without that, just the other stuff was good enough for me to, like you, pass on iphone4 and wait for WP7 instead. The web service is the clincher.
So let’s see – wifi sync, Zune pass, xbox integration, facebook integration, office/outlook integration, free sync service including locate/lock/wipe/backup – wow, still nothing that iphone does!
One thing that struck me as I was thinking about how WP7 could differentiate itself from iphone and android which are both years ahead – do you think MSFT can convince some of the key cellular partners to at least initially launch with a data plan that is slightly lower than the on-going data plans? Or maybe allow unlimited data for the same $25 (say, in AT&T case)?
As we know, the data plan is the majority of the cost of the phone. If AT&T and vodafone can be convinced to deliver something new for WP7, I think it would be a great start!
I don’t have any knowledge of data plan stuff, but I’d imagine this would just be inline with other products.
Yeah, all of this will be great, magical, tear-inducing…one Microsoft actually SHIPS IT.
After the aborts of Courier and HP Windows 7 Tablet, Microsoft has no credibility anymore in actually getting product out the door that matches their pre-ship demos and hype. What does Microsoft possibly have to gain by promising and demonstrating things months and months prior to shipment, which then quite often either don’t ship at all, or ship with reduced or buggy functionality in the shipping version.
As Steve Jobs famously said, “Real artists ship.”
That’s nice. But they’re moving to deliver this thing very aggressively, to be fair. And having actually used near-final product, I can tell you that it’s in great shape. I’m not basing my assessment of this on hype.
I mentioned before that Windows Phone gen1 will miss a lot of little things. It will. So did iPhone. So did (does?) Android. These things mature over time. Microsoft has committed to continually evolving Windows Phone, and while no one can foresee how that’s going to go, I can tell you that, out of the box, this thing is going to blow people away. It’s really neat.
BTW, Steve Jobs shipped the iPhone 4, apparently without sufficiently testing it. Sometimes real artists ship buggy products too.
Courier was never a product. Concept videos of an incubation product were leaked.
The HP Slate wasn’t Microsoft, it was HP, and there are other (very good) Windows 7 tablets out now, and slates coming out later this year from other manufacturers.
Thanks Paul, this article got me excited again.
As a non-business user and an xbox fan, I really hope they get some good games for the phone. The last I heard the focus is going to be turned based gaming, which is neat, but I think they need more than that for this thing to have broad range appeal. They have the infrastructure already in place, so I really hope it happens.
I’m very excited for WP7 to be released. I’m in my early 20′s and looking to buy my first smartphone. (Currently using a Samsung Upstage, and have mostly regretted the past 2 years on it) I just hope Sprint gets some good models and the prices/data plans aren’t too ridiculous…but I think it’ll be worth it for everything I’m seeing.
This might be great… But if Microsoft can’t successfully market this, it’s doomed to fail. Let’s hope they have a better campaign than Jerry Seinfeld, the KIN campaign, or the “Mohave Experiment” commercials…
If anyone is to blame for the KIN not selling well it’s Verizon, imo, MS could’ve added a few apps (calander) but that’s the ONLY area it was a bit weak in, nothing else. The hardware was solid and it looked good and worked good as well. Also the price for the phones was pretty cheap as well. If Verizon had went with a data plan for $40 or $45 then the KIN would’ve sold just fine.
NOW I’m excited. I hope MS pushes big with a ‘top-tier’ phone similar to what Google did with the Nexus One. With better fit/finish ala the iPhones.
I’m actually building an Core i7 desktop with Windows 7 specifically for Windows Phone 7 syncing.
Just when I’m almost tempted by the imminent release of the Droid X, another WinPhone 7 glorious review… I’d really like to replace my aging Motorola Q NOW, but I’d really like a Zune phone…
So given all the wonderful features of the OS, the big question is what are the Samsungs, Motorolas, and HTC’s etc. gonna look and work like? Will they be up to to the job at hand, or will it take another year for the vendors to sort their bugs out?
I can’t wait to get my hands on the device. I’m a developer and I have looked at iPhone (admitedly a cursary glance) and Android(did play with it a fair bit, Java+Eclipse doesn’t equate to performance, neither at developing or at runtime, sorry!)
But WP7 is gr8, technologically it’s a lot superior to Android. And the whole experience seems very modern. I’m enjoying working on my app. gr8 work from Microsoft.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Paul.
Hey Paul!
This is all real exciting!
I was wondering if you could say how integrated SkyDrive will be with the phone?
Do you know if the Windows Phone portion will be partitioned off like the Windows LIve Sync portion is now? Or, will you be able to freely move data between the two, and if you move say a photo from a Skydrive only folder to a Windows Phone Live folder, will it automatically appear on the phone?
Same goes with Office online docs…. Since the Hardware spec doesn’t allow for external storage cards I was just wondering if the phone would make use of the Windows phone Live stuff as an integrated storage system(ala KIN)…
It seems MS has finally found a way to integrate all of their Products in the cloud and on the phone(Xbox, Office, Zune, Windows Live.) And from the looks of the previews and announcements, it seems to be in a more cohesive manner than Google or Apple…. I wonder if Microsoft will get any credit for this..hmmm(try not to laugh)…
I wanted to clarify something for someone… According to Mary Jo Foley(and confirmed by MS) The Windows Phone LIve product doesn’t make use of the Kin Studio yet… (SEE: Microsoft to offer free ‘Find My Phone’ service for Windows Phone 7 | ZDNet http://bit.ly/cXAC6l ) Although wouldn’t it be cool if a hardware maker made a phone targeted at the same KIN demo but with a more full featured phone, and Used KIN studio(once it had been made available for WP7)…just a thought!
Keep up the good work!
SkyDrive is not integrated in any meaningful way for documents, a la the SharePoint stuff in the Office hub. (It should be.) That said, you can view and then save SkyDrive-based Office documents to the phone.
There is a KIN-like auto-save-to-SkyDrive feature for photos. Sadly, it’s almost useless for backup since you can’t opt to save full-res pictures. Which is absolutely unforgivable. A couple of other things related to this, but I’m not sure it’s public.
My guess is that they’re moving toward a KIN Studio model, but it won’t be there on day one, not like was on the KIN.
@paul
Obviously you have ore details than what is available publicly, However while playing around with the beta version of the emulator, there is an option for office documents to sync back to the cloud.
Also during the presentation at WPC, they mention that higher resolution images will be synced back once you are plugged. The lower res images is for OTA syncing:
http://digitalwpc.com/Videos/VisionKeynoteVideos10/2/BradBrooksAndAndyLees
Thanks…
With regards to photo syncing, what I meant was that KIN would automatically sync full resolution photos to the web over the air, which is incredibly useful. Windows Phone will sync only low-res photos over the air to SkyDrive, which is barely useful (like if you want to just share over social networking) to useless (for true backup purposes, as was available on KIN).
I will (hopefully) be completing the Office chapter today, so I will soon look at the Office document sync stuff more closely. But I think this applies only to two things. You can do full sync via SharePoint only, which works just fine, but is a business feature. And you can sync notes in OneNote automatically to SkyDrive (but not Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations). I would love to be proven wrong on this, since I feel that full SkyDrive integration is as important/more important than SharePoint on day one. But I will make sure.
I looked at the emulator again and sync settings I found were only in OneNote.
I agree that full SkyDrive integration with Office Web Apps is pretty important considering it’s consumer focused. SharePoint is clearly aimed at business users, which they don’t want to neglect either I suppose.
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