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Windows Series 7 - The complete Keynote breakdown
Daniel Carey
It finally happened; Today in Barcelona at 3:11PM Steve Balmer graced the stage, ready to reveal the latest mobile platform from the Redmond situated company. During the opening minutes of the presentation Balmer posed, that newly introduced mobile operating systems have to be consumer friendly. Did Microsoft achieve this?
More after the Break
"At the end of the day, this all about the phone and how the consumer will react to these devices. It's our pleasure to share with you the next version of Windows Phones… the 7 Series"
At 3:12PM Balmer graciously handed the torch to Joe Belfiore -- Corporate Vice President for Windows Phones. During his time on stage Joe Belifore talked about the evolution of smartphones and the manner in which they are now able to take on more complex tasks i.e. multitasking and cloud based computing.
"Phones kind of look like PCs… and the phone is not a PC. They all started to look the same. We wanted to revisit how we thought about the design. We wanted to move beyond the metaphor that works well for the PC. We asked ourselves a couple of questions. We said, how can we build a phone that focuses on the end user?"
It became clear at this point that Microsoft had indeed chosen to completely gut previous Windows Mobile versions and start anew. With that in mind, Microsoft focused the bewildered attention of the audience towards the new and improved user interface. The home screen is now comprised of several “tiles” that are continually updating. Images and social status are continually being pulled from social networking sites like Facebook. The home screen can be configured to allow for certain social updates to be continually pushed to the home screen, thus allowing you to maintain social vigilance.
The new calendar application:
The implementation of the calendar is amazing:
"So I'm going to go back, I'm back at my calendar… I'm going to think of a way to use some free time. I haven't had any time to get lunch… so her in Spain, I'm a fan of Sushi -- I touch the search button… and here I am in the Bing search environment"
From the screenshots shown, it appears as though the implementation of several mini-applications in the calendar are quite remarkable. For instance, the example given relates to restaurant finding – if that’s the case then you are given the option to either call or read reviews pertaining to that particular restaurant; it can be noted that this feature is similar to the iPhone's Urban Spoon application.
We can confirm that there is indeed support for multitouch:
"We support multitouch and all these rich multitouch gestures. It's consistent with our PC implementation"
Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile has never resulted in a good browsing experience, sure Microsoft has released patches and updates, but the end result was always abysmal. Windows Series 7 sets out change that; the newest version of Internet Explorer is solely based off of the desktop version, this should in theory result in better mobile browsing.
Email appears to have received a substantial overhaul. The interface is clean and crisp with support for: flags, attachments, and multiple message management.
There are several default services that shall come standard on all Windows Series 7 phones. Microsoft has decided to name these integrative services “Hubs". The main five hubs incorporated into the operating system are: People, Pictures, Office, Music and Video and lastly Games.
A major turning point for this OS has to be the integrated Zune application. Whilst this is stellar, it also means that Mac users are going to be left out in the dark as far as support is concerned. Whilst this is sad, it may change sometime in the future, however, don’t quote us on that. Back to the Music and Video application, there is currently support for Pandora Radio, which will most likely mean some form of partnership with the Internet based radio company.
Gaming appears to be another heavily advertised feature of this OS. Xbox Live integration is prevalent, however it’s as of this moment hard to tell how well it will perform. Having said that Microsoft stated that they are wishing to bring the same Xbox Live functionality experienced on PCs to mobile phones everywhere. – Supposedly one could deduce that the gaming experience is going to be killer at best.
At this point Steve Balmer once again took the stage, during this time he discussed the future of Windows Mobile 6.5. Interestingly enough Windows Mobile 6.5 will not cease to be produced. He later went on talk about hardware partners as well as launch carriers.
Hardware Partners and Launch Carriers:
This concludes our play-by-play variant of the keynote, be sure to stay tuned for any other coverage relating to the latest Windows OS; and with that being said we bid you adieu.
