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Windows Phone 7 Series: Now That’s More Like It!

Windows Phone 7 Series generic phone

A New Windows for the Phone

Ever since joining The Empire, I’ve been saying that Windows Mobile needs to go back to the drawing board. While there was good technology lying in its innards – mobile versions of the .NET framework, SQL Server and Office – treating the mobile form factor as “the desktop, but much, much smaller”, was the wrong approach. In the meantime, the Esteemed Competition were doing the right thing: designing their phones’ OS features and interface from the ground up rather than attempting to force-fit the desktop UI into a pocket UI.

Today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft previewed the latest in a series of steps forward – consider Xbox to Xbox 360, Windows Vista to Windows 7, Live Search to Bing – there’s now Windows Phone 7 Series.

(The name’s a bit long. Whoever does the naming at Microsoft corporate HQ must get paid by the syllable.)

A Quick Look at Windows Phone’s Experience

A good starting point is this video, which covers Windows Phone’s features in three minutes, thirty seconds:

You can take an interactive tour of the UI at the Windows Phone 7 Series site:

Screenshot of the Windows Phone 7 Series site's home page

A Closer Look at the Windows Phone Experience

Over at Channel 9, Laura Foy has posted her interview with Joe Belfiore, VP Windows Phone 7 Program Management, who gave her a walkthrough of the goodies in Windows Phone (the video is 22 minutes, 18 seconds):

Get Microsoft Silverlight

Some quick notes from the video:

  • There are three mandatory hardware buttons, which are context-sensitive:
    • Back
    • Windows (the “Start” button)
    • Search
  • The screen is a capacitive touch-screen, capable of supporting multi-touch
  • The Start menu is built up of tiles: little block representing the information and features that you care most about
    • You can add your own custom tiles; Joe shows a “me” tile linked to his Facebook profile
  • A browser with:
    • Snappy performance
    • Support for multitouch actions such as pinch zoom, double-tap to zoom and finger drag
    • Very readable text, that to sub-pixel positioning in HTML
    • Phone number recognition in HTML documents; touch them to dial them
    • Street address recognition in HTML documents; touch them to get a map
    • Multiple tabs
  • The “People Hub”
    • Aggregates Exchange, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and other mail contacts
    • Provides a live feed of your contacts
  • Context-sensitive search:
    • Press the “Search” button while in the People Hub, and you search your people list
    • Press the “Search” button while in the Start menu, and it runs a web search
      • Based on your query, it knows whether to give you a web search result or a local search result
      • In the demo, Joe does a search for pizza and gets a map and results for pizzerias near him, and a quick pan over to adjacent pages yield directions and reviews
      • A tap on “nearby” yield the locations of useful things like parking, ATMs and so on near the selected pizzeria
      • In another demo search, Joe does a search for “Avatar” and it returns a list of nearby theatres and times for the movie Avatar; a quick pan to an adjacent page yields the results for local business and places with “Avatar” in the name
  • Email:
    • Easy pivoting between unread, flagged and urgent emails
    • A caching system prevents you from seeing the dreaded “loading” screen
    • Press “Search” within email and you perform a search of your email messages, by subject, text and so on
  • Rotation: you can operate the phone in “portrait” or “landscape” mode
  • Calendar:
    • Support for both work and personal calendars
  • ActiveSync works in the background and keeps the phone synced with email, contacts and calendar
  • User-customizable UI colour schemes
  • The “Pictures Hub”
    • Gallery: Lets you browse all the pictures on your phone
    • Mosaic: Recent and favourite pictures
    • What’s New: New photos from your social networks
    • Camera roll: A folder for photos taken with your phone
    • Support for photo albums from Facebook and Windows Live, which you browse as if they lived right on your phone
  • Music and Video
    • History: Most recently played music and videos
    • New: New music and videos added since the last sync
    • Zune HD-style marketplace searching and support for Zune subscriptions with unlimited music plays
  • The “Me” tile
    • Lets you update your status on places like Facebook
    • Nice little typing features like auto-spelling-correction and a special soft keyboard for emoticons
  • The UI concept: Windows Phone is task-centric, not app-centric, with a hub associated with each: people, photos, media
  • There’s also a games hub, which ties into Xbox Live
  • Third-party applications and games? Wait…

Wait a Minute…What About Third-Party Apps and Games?

"MIX10: The Next Web Now" logo buttonCan you wait a month?

Here’s the deal: the announcement at Mobile World Congress was about showing what Windows Phone can do. As for what’s possible on the developer front, it’ll all be announced at the MIX10 Conference, which takes place from March 15th through 17th in Las Vegas.

There will be a dozen sessions at MIX10 for Windows Phone, and they promise to be quite interesting. I’ll be at MIX10, and will blog what I learn from these sessions when they take place.

You can save $200 off the price of MIX10 registration if you register before February 21st, so if you want to get in on the ground floor with Windows Phone and save some money, register now!

What the Tech Press is Saying

Pretty good stuff, actually. Rather than bury you with links to a zillion blog entries filed from Mobile World Congress, I thought I’d pick two of the big tech blogs, Gizmodo and Engadget:

Here’s what Gizmodo has to say about the new Windows Phone:

It’s different. The face of Windows Phone 7 is not a rectangular grid of thumbnail-sized glossy-looking icons, arranged in a pattern of 4×4 or so, like basically every other phone. No, instead, an oversized set of bright, superflat squares fill the screen. The pop of the primary colors and exaggerated flatness produces a kind of cutting-edge crispness that feels both incredibly modern and playful. Text is big, and beautiful. The result is a feat no phone has performed before: Making the iPhone’s interface feel staid.

If you want to know what it feels like, the Zune HD provides a taste: Interface elements that run off the screen; beautiful, oversized text and graphics; flipping, panning, scrolling, zooming from screen to screen; broken hearts. Some people might think it’s gratuitous, but I think it feels natural and just…fun. There’s an incredible sense of joie de vivre that’s just not in any other phone. It makes you wish that this was aesthetic direction all of Microsoft was going in.

Here are Engadget’s impressions, after having some hands-on time with Windows Phone:

The design and layout of 7 Series’ UI (internally called Metro) is really quite original, utilizing what one of the designers (Albert Shum, formerly of Nike) calls an "authentically digital" and "chromeless" experience. What does that mean? Well we can tell you what it doesn’t mean — no shaded icons, no faux 3D or drop shadows, no busy backgrounds (no backgrounds at all), and very little visual flair besides clean typography and transition animations. The whole look is strangely reminiscent of a terminal display (maybe Microsoft is recalling its DOS roots here) — almost Tron-like in its primary color simplicity. To us, it’s rather exciting. This OS looks nothing like anything else on the market, and we think that’s to its advantage. Admittedly, we could stand for a little more information available within single views, and we have yet to see how the phone will handle things like notifications, but the design of the interface is definitely in a class of its own.

(In another article, Engadget simply summed it up with “Microsoft is playing to win”.)

Watch this Space!

"Counting Down to Seven" badgeWe’ll have more announcements about Windows Phone over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on this blog!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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A Little Netbook Experiment

“The Horror! The Horror!”

coding horror logo “d00d,” began the capitalization- and punctuation-free email I received on Sunday, “coding horror atwood is totaly [sic] waling on ur azz”. Curious to see exactly how Jeff was “waling on my azz”, I pointed my browser at his blog, Coding Horror, one of the “800-pound gorillas” of the tech blog scene and found his latest article, titled A Democracy of Netbooks.

In A Democracy of Netbooks, Jeff rebuts an article of mine from late last May, Fast Food Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck. The thesis of my article was that netbooks occupied an unhappy, “worst of both worlds” middle ground between smartphones and notebook computers: a bit too big to fit in your pocket, a little too small to do a lot of work on, and sadly underpowered. As I summed it up, “netbooks are like laptops, but lamer”.

Jeff argues that netbooks are the opposite. He says that by virtue of their low cost, they’re a democratizing force that provide computing and communicative power to all. Unlike smartphones, you’re not at the mercy of a phone company’s monthly fees or contracts (and remember, I’m in Canada, the only country in the world where 3-year mobile contracts exist). “Netbooks aren’t an alternative to notebook computers,” he writes, they are the new computers.”

Unfortunately, Jeff missed my follow-up to Fast Food Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck, in which I explained the motivation behind the article:

I feel that there’s a little too much excitement about netbooks at Microsoft. I think that part of it stems from the old company mantra, “a computer on every desktop and in every home”. The PC is the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, and the closer that a device is to the PC, the more Microsoft “gets” it. I feel that Microsoft sees the netbook as an exciting new space, where I see them as smaller, less powerful laptops. I think that eventually, as technology catches up, netbooks will simply be considered “computers” – just on the small end of the PC size spectrum, and that Microsoft should treat them as such.

The article is also an open letter to Microsoft stating my concern that netbooks are a dangerous red herring distracting us from where the real potential in mobile computing is: the smartphone. It’s an area where Microsoft had an early lead and dropped the ball. It’s an area where I feel that Microsoft is showing a lack of vision, from Steve Ballmer’s ill-considered dismissal of the iPhone (“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”) to Windows Mobile 6, which feels as though it was half-assedly slapped together by PDA designers frozen in an iceberg in 2000.

Still, I’m glad that Jeff found my article worth writing about and happy to see that it’s started some discussion.

Ooh! Free Netbook!

As the hardware sponsor of the Canadian version of Techdays – Microsoft’s cross-country, seven-city tools and technology training conference – Dell provided us with a number of computers, including about a dozen of Latitude 2100 netbooks. They performed yeoman service as hosts for a rotating slide deck that we’d display between conference sessions, in both the presentation theatres as well as in the hallways.

Here’s what they look like when artfully posed by a photographer for the marketing material:

latitude 2100s

By the bye, those bodies are rubberized and have a cross-hatched pattern.

Here’s one of the netbooks in action, quietly working as Dylan Smith makes his presentation at TechDays Winnipeg:

dylan smith and netbook

…and here are IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus, me and IT Pro Evangelist Rodney Buike striking a “Charlie’s Angels” pose with the three colours of netbooks we were provided:

charlies_angels_netbook_pose

On December 16th, 2009 at 4:00 p.m., the very moment that TechDays Winnipeg ended, the netbooks were retired from conference service and all the evangelists team got to pick one. Although I’d rather have been assigned the “Dellasaurus” – a 17” monster with quad-core chip and 16 gigs of RAM — I’m not the type to turn up his nose at being assigned another computer. I chose one of the Kermit-the-Frog-green ones.

The Experiment

dell latitude 2100

Thus far, my netbook has been relegated to ebook-reading duty and little else, but in light of Jeff’s article, I figured that this might be an opportunity to put it to the test. What if I were to set aside a week to use the netbook as my one and only machine in my day-to-day work and life? Would I be pleasantly surprised, driven mad, or neither?

Starting on Sunday and continuing through to next Saturday, I will use the Dell Latitude 2100 exclusively. This should be an interesting test, as I will be working in a number of places:

  • At my home office
  • At HacklabTO, the Toronto “hackerspace” where I’m a member and which I often use as a coworking space
  • At a meeting with a client
  • On the road: I’ll be flying to Montreal to attend CUSEC (Canadian University Software Engineering Conference) as a sponsor representative and host of DemoCamp. This should be a good test of the netbook under the conditions where it’s supposed to shine.

By the way, does anyone know what the Canadian domestic flight carry-on restrictions are in the wake of the Underwear Bomber?

Here are its specs:

  • Processor: Intel Atom N270 running at 1.6GHz with 512K L2 cache and 533MHz bus
  • Chipset: Intel 945 PM/GS Express
  • Graphics: Intel Integrated GMA 950
  • Display: 10.1” WSVGA 1024 by 600 LED display
  • Other Goodies:
    • Integrated webcam
    • Single-touch screen
  • RAM: 2GB (1GB on-board plus 1GB in the memory slot)
  • Hard Drive: 160GB, 5400 RPM
  • Wifi: Intel WiFi Link 5100 802.11 a/g/n mini card
  • Battery: 3-cell (there’s a 6-cell available)

When benchmarked using the Windows Experience Index, it yielded a base score of 2.0. Here are its Windows Experience Index subscores (the index rates components on a scale of 1.0 to 7.9):

  • Processor: 2.1
  • Memory: 4.5
  • Graphics: 2.0
  • Gaming graphics: 3.0
  • Primary hard disk: 5.3

Since the netbooks were being used as secondary PowerPoint machines for TechDays, they already had the following installed on them:

The software selection above is probably the sort of thing that most office workers (and students, the market at whom the Latitude 2100 is aimed) would use from day to day. In addition to these apps, I installed some of the tools of the developer evangelist trade:

I’ll report on my experiences using the netbook as my primary machine regularly and tell you about the good, the bad and the ugly (or beautiful, because one never knows).

I have only one question: Jeff, do you want to try the same thing?

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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WinMoDevCamp Toronto’s Agenda

Toronto WinMoDevCamp logo

WinMoDevCamp Toronto, the Toronto edition of the workshop for developing applications for Windows Phone, takes place today at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters.

If you can’r make it to WinMoDevCamp in person, you can attend virtually by watching the streaming video feed.

Here’s the agenda (all times are Eastern):

12:30 pm – 1:00 pm

Light Snacks and Event Registration

1:00 pm – 1:15 pm

Opening Remarks & Explanation of WinMoDevCamp purpose.

1:15 pm – 1:45 pm

Keynote by Microsoft Canada’s Joey deVilla, Developer Evangelist.
This session will give you an overview Microsoft’s commitment to mobility and the tools in place to assist developers in creating world class applications.

1:45 pm – 2:00 pm

Break

2:00 pm – 3:00 pm

Developing for Windows Mobile – Mark Arteaga, RedBit

Learn how to use the familiar Microsoft .NET Framework and .NET-based programming languages like Visual C#® development tools to develop world class applications. Learn about new features in Windows Mobile 6.5 such as the Gesture APIs and the Widget Framework and how to use them appropriately.

3:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Saviidesk – Joe Compta, Bradon Technologies Ltd (Bell Mobility)

Application presentation and demo

3:30 pm – 3:45 pm

Break

3:45 pm – 4:15 pm

Telus Application Developer Program Presentation

Program presentation and overview

4:15 pm – 4:45 pm

Merge Healthcare OEM – Atul Agarwal, Director Web Apps

Application presentation and demo

4:45 pm – 5:45 pm

Samsung TouchWiz and Widgets – Max Karlin, Samsung Canada
An in-depth look at Samsung’s TouchWiz UI and Widgets. How to develop widgets, upcoming features and functionality and how to distribute widgets for Samsung devices.

5:45 pm – 6:30 pm

Dinner – Windows Marketplace Overview, Anthony Bartolo, Microsoft

6:30pm – 7:00 pm

vPost, Sculpting Mobile Data Convergence – John Cousens, Vayyoo

Application presentation and demo

7:00pm – 7:30 pm

Sony Ericsson “Hero” Developer Program – Sean Cheddi, Sony Ericsson

Developer Program enrolment and Panel SDK overview

7:30pm – 8:00 pm

WinMoDevCamp wrap up and Prize Giveaway

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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WinMoDevCamp Toronto This Wednesday!

WinMoDevCamp banner

WinMoDevCamp Toronto, the free workshop where you can learn about Windows Phone Development, takes place this Wednesday at Microsoft Canada’s offices in Mississauga. Come learn about Windows Phone by participating in a development project, and come meet some of the faces (including me) at the local branch of The Empire! (And yes, we’ll serve snacks and dinner.)

WinMoDevCamp is free of charge and takes place this Wednesday, November 11th, from 1 to 9 p.m. at Microsoft Canada Headquarters (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard, just off Mississauga Road north of the 401). To participate in WinMoDevCamp, please register.

Click to register for WinMoDevCamp

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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The New Yorker’s Hallowe’en Cover and Why You Should Go to WinMoDevCamp

The New Yorker’s Hallowe’en Cover

I make sure to keep an eye on how technology pops up in mainstream non-geek culture because it’s a good way to gauge the techno-cultural zeitgeist and see how technologies are being received by the public at large. As techies, we’re all too happy to be early adopters and are willing to put up with usability problems, annoyances and extra work just to have the latest and greatest gear for its own sake. We have a tendency to forget that many non-techies don’t adopt technologies while they’re still new and need a techie mindset to use; they’ wait until technologies evolve to the point where the benefits outweigh the annoyances.

The current issue of The New Yorker has a Hallowe’en-themed cover that hints at how much smartphones have worked their way into everyday people’s lives:

New Yorker Halloween Cover

Here’s a closeup:

New Yorker Halloween Cover closeup

(I’ll bet that at least one of you went out Saturday night trick-or-treating and checked your smartphone.)

The practical upshot of all this: the mobile platform is in your future. It’s the one that people take everywhere and it’s growing in power in leaps and bounds the way desktop (and later, laptop) computers did in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

WinMoDevCamp

WinMoDevCamp banner

Speaking of mobile platforms, we’re holding a full-day workshop on Windows Phone development called WinMoDevCamp Toronto next Wednesday, November 11th  from noon to 9 p.m. at the Microsoft Mississauga offices (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard). It’s free of charge and your chance to learn how to develop applications for Windows Phone.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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One-Handed Computing

Yes, you probably went here as soon as you saw the phrase “One-Handed Computing”:

"Successories" style poster featuring a woman gasping as a man shows her something on his computer: "Your Porn Collection. Probably best kept to yourself."

But in this case, I’m talking about what Jason Kottke is talking about — those times when you use mobile technology while your other hand isn’t free because you’re:

  • Eating
  • Drinking
  • Carrying or feeding a baby
  • Walking the dog
  • Carrying groceries
  • “Straphanging” on a train or bus
  • Getting by with a broken arm

In the cases above – and I’m sure you can think of many more – you’re accessing computing resources in a very undesktop-like way: with only one hand, and even then, a limited portion of that hand since most of your fingers are busy holding that phone. You’re likely using only your thumb, as shown below:

windows mobile 6.5 and thumb

There are lots of times when users are stuck in “one-thumb mode”. If you’re building mobile applications, you should keep that in mind and make sure you design your user interfaces accordingly. You might need to consider things like:

  • The size of touchscreen controls: make them too small and they’re not thumb-friendly.
  • The number of controls on the screen; the maximum number is dictated by their size.
  • Navigation in your app. Hierarchical arrangements make sense to developers, but lots of user experience people will tell you that ordinary people don’t get hierarchies.
  • Which functions will your users use most often? You should make those very easily accessible. Which functions will your users use less often? You might be able to put them on a secondary or tertiary screen.
  • Can you get information without making the user enter it? For example, can you infer information based on the user’s location, which you can grab from GPS instead of asking for him/her to enter it? Can your application remember your user’s most often-used data?
  • Can you get other kinds of one-handed input, such as from the camera, accelerometer, magnetometer or other sensors?

That’s a fair bit to think about, and I might have to present some ideas at the upcoming Toronto WinMoDevCamp (and yes, I’ll also blog them).

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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WinMoDevCamp Toronto: Wednesday November 11th at Microsoft’s Mississauga Office

winmodevcamp

WinMoDevCamp, the worldwide series of development workshops for Windows-based mobile phones, is coming to Toronto on Wednesday, November 11th! If you want to learn how to develop applications for Windows Phone (the mobile operating system formerly known as Windows Mobile), this full-day workshop will give you the opportunity to get some hands-on training and experience. We’ll have all kinds of people speaking and attending, including:

  • Mobile developers
  • Web developers
  • .NET developers
  • UI/WX specialists
  • Software testers
  • Device manufacturers
  • Canadian mobile carriers

…all at this workshop, all working – either solo or in teams – on a Windows Phone project. (While you can choose to work solo, you’ll miss out on the brainpower, business and social opportunities that teaming up will provide).

At the event, you will:

  • Create a new application for the Windows Phone platform and mobile apps that support Windows enterprise applications
  • Meet and work side-by-side team members from the Microsoft Mobile Developer Experience team
  • Get help porting your existing iPhone, BlackBerry and Palm Pre apps to the Windows platform
  • Interact with reps from a number of Canadian mobile carriers, including Bell, Telus, Rogers and WIND

This free event will take place on Wednesday, November 11th at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters in Mississauga (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard, just off Mississauga Road north of the 401) from 1:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.. We’ll serve snacks and dinner, so you won’t starve while you create mobile apps. And yes, I’ll be there, helping out and even writing code.

If you’d like to attend WinMoDevCamp Toronto, all you have to do is register! (And if you need a lift out to Mississauga, drop me a line and I can give you a lift from High Park subway station to Microsoft and back.)

Clik to register for winmodevcamp

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.