Windows Phone 7 – The Good, the Bad

I was too positive till the time I had a closer look.

Microsoft, today, launched the OS it had been betting on. The OS is beautiful, built ground up with new Architecture, it has little resemblances to any of the leading smarphones OS in the market. Unlike Nokia or RIM, started from scratch and didn’t copy Apple or Google.

The concept of  tiles instead of the icons on iPhone & Android is unique and intuitive, like no other. It shows you all sorts of information from services and your social network up front.

The hardware (the phones) also look promising with top notch hardware from top phone manufactures: HTC, Samsung, Dell, etc.

The Hubs, People, Messaging, Xbox Game center, all the good stuff has already been said by Microsoft

So what could be the Bad?

1. Existing smartphone users won’t switch: For US buyers, it won’t be available on Verizon. That means iPhone owners will have little plans to switch to it, knowing that it just does more tiles than iPhone minus all the apps. And most Android users are very faithful to the platform, they chose the Android platform not because of the visual appeal, but the Features, customizations, openness & power Android offers.

2. The Wait for Apps: Like Andy Rubin said, “we don’t need another platform”. A mobile platform takes years to mature and to have 10s of thousands of apps that iPhone and Android today have. I would be surprised if there are close to 1,000 apps available to start. Compare to Android, with more than 110,000, and iPhone, with 270,000, it would be nowhere for at least next 2 years. After all, apps matter the most.

3. Time to Mature: Like every platform, there will be bugs. Back in 2007, Apple was pretty good, even they had bugs. But Apple had advantage of being first in market, they had all the time to fix/add things. Microsoft is famous for something else: Bugs, crashes (how about ctrl+alt +delete for WP7?) Did Microsoft ever ship a bug-free product? buzz me. If took Apple & google 2+ years to prepare a Robust Mobile OS, what is your bet for Microsoft?

So the whole ecosystem, today, over on Apple & Google is much stronger and less buggy.

4. No Copy Paste, No Multitasking: Welcome to year 2007, when a  new Smartphone launches with so many innovative features that people ignore some basic features like copy/paste, multitasking. Nah, not at all, this is not 2007. Apple & Google have raised the bars. Forget power users, even non-geeks were enticed by iPhone’s Multitasking launch in iOS 4, even when they had little idea about what it really was.

The Verdict

There’s nothing wrong with Windows Phone & its new innovative features. Its just that the time is not right, its too late. If it had been 2007, I could have foreseen Microsoft’s bright future.

For Non-Geeks: If you wish to look stupid among your friends, buy this WP7 and iPhone, Android users would insult you for not having any of the popular apps, that they had been using for years.

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