Microsoft introduces Windows Phone 7 and partners' smartphones

Earlier today, Microsoft formally introduced Windows Phone 7 in New York, along with ten new compatible smartphones (nine at launch, the tenth in early 2011) to be offered by sixty carriers in more than thirty countries. Each carrier will sell a different set of phones; AT&T, for example, will offer three models, one each from HTC, Samsung and LG, all priced at $199, while T-Mobile USA will offer one model each from Dell and HTC. (Engadget has a complete list of carriers and the phones they'll offer, and Gizmodo has pictures of all the phones.)

The early reviews for Windows Phone 7 have been very positive. The operating system is a clean break from Windows Mobile and has more in common with the Zune UI than it does with Windows. The phones vary considerably in price and features, but they all seem to perform well, even though Windows Phone 7 uses a lot of animation in its user interface.

Update: Well, some of the reviews aren't quite so good after all: PC Magazine reports that the LG Quantum's slide-out keyboard has a "bizarre" keyboard layout and a balky sliding mechanism. Of more concern is that Windows Phone 7 doesn't want to reconfigure its display properly when the phone is moved to landscape format. The LG Quantum's keyboard forces the phone to be used in landscape format, so unless Microsoft fixes the problem soon, the Quantum and similar phones will be virtually unusable.

As you might expect, there's already a fair amount of "too little, too late" sentiment about Windows Phone 7. Those feelings may ultimately be justified, but Microsoft has done an excellent job of bringing top-notch smartphone manufacturers on board. The big question remains third-party developers. Apple and Google both have tremendous support for their smartphone operating systems, and RIM's BlackBerry, while not as well accepted by the developer community, has an entrenched customer base. The third-party app announcements and demonstrations at the launch event today were nice but far from overwhelming.

Windows Phone 7 smartphones will ship so late this year that they probably won't make much market headway until next year. Developers that are already struggling to keep up with updates on the iOS and Android platform are likely to take a "wait and see" attitude on developing Windows Phone 7 apps; developers of the most popular iOS and Android games may be offered financial incentives by Microsoft to port their applications. There's no rush for them to staff up in advance if they can get Microsoft to pay for the effort.

In the long run, Windows Phone 7 is likely to have more impact on HP and Nokia than it does on Apple or Google. Most developers, given the choice between supporting Windows Phone 7 that runs on smartphones from four manufacturers, or supporting WebOS that runs only on HP's smartphones, are likely to prefer Microsoft's platform. And, at least in the U.S., Windows Phone 7 will be one more nail in Nokia's smartphone coffin.

There were two puzzling aspects of today's announcements: The first was Microsoft's statement that based on feedback from developers and early users, it would release a version of Windows Phone 7 that supports cut and paste in early 2011. You would think that Microsoft would have learned from Apple's experiences with the iPhone and would have incorporate cut and paste from day one.

The second was that Verizon, the largest mobile operator in the U.S., was completely absent from today's announcement. You may recall that Verizon was Microsoft's exclusive carrier partner for the Kin, its feature phone that was a complete marketing and business disaster for both companies. Kin's failure may explain why Verizon won't be selling Windows Phone 7 smartphones any time soon. However, Verizon may also be gearing up to carry the iPhone, as has been rumored by the Wall Street Journal and other sources, in which case it really doesn't need Windows Phone 7.

Here comes your $99 eBook reader/tablet

Earlier this week, Marvell displayed engineering prototypes of "Moby", a tablet powered by its Armada processor that will run either Android or Windows Mobile. Moby will come will built-in WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS, the ability to encode and decode 1080p HD video in real time and 3D graphics support. The tablet will support Flash, and Marvell claims that end-user devices based on its reference design will be able to be sold for $99. As Technologizer pointed out, the tablets shown at this week's Future of Publishing Summit were rough engineering prototypes, so Marvell's claim that production versions ready for customer delivery will be ready by the end of the year is probably correct.

One interesting aspect is that Marvell is targeting the education eBook market with Moby; the company's press release is full of references to the educational market, and Marvell even plans to give Mobys away to every student at an at-risk school once the device goes into production. There have been companies targeting the low end of the eBook reader market, but $99 is an awfully low price point to beat. The advantages of full color, video and Flash will outweigh any disadvantages of using an LCD display instead of e-Ink for educational applications.

In any event, the tablet market is getting very crowded, very quickly, and Marvell is positioning itself to be one of the arms merchants.

Sidekick data lost, Danger may be dead

According to this report from CNet, T-Mobile Sidekick users have been unable to access their data, such as calendars, address books, etc. starting more than a week ago. The Sidekick stores most of its users' personal data on servers, rather than on the device itself. Danger, the company that created the Sidekick and operated the servers, was purchased by Microsoft for $500 million last year. Now, according to multiple sources, T-Mobile and Microsoft have notified Sidekick users that the data have most likely been permanently lost; there is a slim but highly unlikely chance that they can be recovered.

T-Mobile has apparently suspended online (and, one presumes, in-store) sales of Sidekicks, and it's hard to believe that they would put them back on sale, or convince customers that the Sidekicks will be any more reliable in the future than they are now. To the contrary, T-Mobile and Microsoft are probably facing a massive recall and expense as customers turn in their Sidekicks for other phones.

This could turn into an unexpected windfall for Google and the Android platform if customers decide to replace their Sidekicks with Android-compatible phones. (In an ironic twist, Andy Rubin, the father of Android, was one of Danger's founders.) Microsoft might try to steer Sidekick customers to Windows Mobile phones, but since Microsoft was responsible for the failure, it's unlikely that they're going to be able to force anyone to go with a Windows phone.

The handwriting has been on the wall for the Sidekick for some time; it's a dead platform. Key members of the Danger team have left Microsoft, and most of the others are now working on the ever-increasingly less secret "Pink" project. However, the platform still had an active base of users and supporters, at least until today.

If T-Mobile and Microsoft don't announce a replacement program soon, expect to see class action lawsuits filed across the country. (Even with a recall, the lawsuits may get filed anyway due to the loss of personal data.) In any event, the Sidekick platform is dead, and the future reliability of any Microsoft-run cloud-based service is in question.

UPDATE 15 October 2009: According to TechCrunch, it now appears that Microsoft has been able to recover most of the lost Sidekick user data, and will begin restoring the information "soon" (the next status update is scheduled for Saturday, so it may be several days or more before users get their data back.)

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• T-Mobile: All Your Sidekick Data Has Been Lost Forever (mashable.com)
• T-Mobile: we probably lost all your Sidekick data (engadget.com)

Something's coming from Adobe and Google

I'll be following two big announcements tomorrow. First, Adobe will launch Creative Suite 4 at events around the world. In this column, I normally write about Flash Video, but the applications in Creative Suite, including Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Acrobat, are Adobe's true bread and butter. I've been using betas of Dreamweaver and Fireworks CS4 for some time; both products, which came from Macromedia in the Adobe-Macromedia merger, now look and feel more like Adobe applications. Whether that's better or worse depends on whether you prefer the old or new user interfaces. To my eye, the functionality of the CS4 applications has been modestly upgraded, at best. We'll know more tomorrow.

(Update 10:14 p.m. Pacific Time, September 22, 2008) Adobe has posted details of the new CS4 bundles on its website, prior to the announcement events tomorrow. As with CS3, there are seven bundles: Standard and Premium versions of the Web, Design and (Video) Production bundles, plus a Master Collection that includes everything. There are no bargains, either: Unless you were one of the few people who purchased 3.3 versions of the bundles, upgrades start at $499 for the Standard bundle versions, $599 for the Premium versions, and $899 for the Master Collection. If you're starting from scratch, the Standard bundles are $1,399, the Premium bundles are $1,699, and the Master Collection is $2,499. (All prices are in US dollars).

Image via CrunchBase
The bigger announcement, at least in terms of press interest, will be the T-Mobile/Google annoumcement of the first Android phone, the HTC Dream, and of the imminent completion of T-Mobile's 3G mobile service rollout throughout the U.S. Android phones will compete with iPhones and Windows Mobile-based smartphones at the top of the mobile phone food chain, and the Dream is rumored to sell for the same $199 price (on a two-year plan) as the base 3G iPhone. The Dream will have a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, which promises to make it easier to use for power emailers than the iPhone (yet most likely still at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the BlackBerry.) All of the applications in Google's Android store will be free, at least initially, and anyone can post applications (the countdown to the first Android malware has already begun.)

I've been playing with the Android development system on my PC for some time, but I'm reserving judgment on how the Dream performs until I get a chance to try it. I used to be a T-Mobile customer, and if the Dream lives up to the hype, I may well switch back. Again, more tomorrow.

Evernote: My New Cool Tool

For years, when I've found an article on the web that I wanted to keep, I've printed the page. That wastes paper, and I usually end up throwing out the stacks of printouts. Recently, I've adopted Evernote, which allows me to save the articles both on- and offline. It supports Windows and Mac, most browsers, as well as Windows Mobile smartphones and now, iPhones as well. I was a very early beta user and ended up uninstalling the software because of problems it caused with my PC, but the glitches have mostly been worked out and it's now available to everyone in open beta.

If you run the desktop version, you can store documents locally; otherwise, your documents will be kept on their remote server. (You can also sync local and remote documents so that all your devices have access to your complete library.) You can organize documents into multiple notebooks, or repositories. Documents are searchable, tags can be added, links remain live, and you can always get back to the original webpage, even if you only clipped a portion of it.

The basic version of Evernote is free (that's what I'm using), but if you find yourself using it much more heavily than I do, you can upgrade to a paid subscription with more storage space. It's worth a try.

The Real News from Apple

Today's announcement of the iPhone 3G at Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference has been rehashed and dissected by reporters and news anchors all day. However, the iPhone announcement itself was fairly anticlimactic; the new features had been well-covered in leaked reports prior to the announcement. (In fact, the lack of new features beyond 3G and GPS was somewhat surprising.) Even the dramatic price drop had been foreshadowed by widely-publicized reports.

I think that the real news wasn't the iPhone announcement, but what came before: A slew of application demos, plus the announcement of Apple's MobileMe service. Let's take the applications first: While they were being demonstrated, some of the live bloggers griped that they were tedious and just went on and on, but that was the point: In just a few months, Apple has built a bigger, more productive developer ecosystem than Symbian has been able to do in years, and no one else (including RIM, which just recently launched its own developers' program) is even in the same ballpark. Even Microsoft's smartphone platform can't deliver applications with the quality of experience of those designed for the iPhone.

Over and over again, the story was: "We've covered all the bases." Enterprise applications? Check. Exchange integration? Check. Desktop application support? Check. Location-based applications? Check. Games? Check. All of this was on top of the basic capabilities of the iPhone, now fortified with sufficient 3G speed to make heavily data- and media-centric applications work.

The other part of the story is MobileMe. At its heart, MobileMe is a centralized storage and synchronization application that allows iPhones, Macs and PCs to be synced to a single, central database that's managed by Apple. Now, all of the capabilities of MobileMe are available in some form from a variety of vendors, but they don't necessarily work very well. As a long-time ActiveSync user, I can tell you that getting my PC notebook to stay in sync with my old Windows Mobile PDA and current Windows Mobile Smartphone (let alone my MacBook) can be an exercise in frustration.

MobileMe is aimed at two targets: The large body of Windows Mobile users who are frustrated to death with ActiveSync, and everyone who has held off on buying an iPhone because it doesn't have the "it just works" syncing capabilities of RIM's Blackberry. It's far too early to tell just how well Apple has implemented MobileMe, and it may very have its own frustrations and limitations. However, it has the potential to be a very appealing alternative to Microsoft's and RIM's offerings.

The one big frustration that I have with the announcements is that the iPhone 3G still doesn't have video camera capabilities. A 3G iPhone with the video capabilities of, say, a Nokia N95, would be a multimedia killer product, and I'm still not giving up hope that Apple with do something in this space in the future.