Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled Windows Phone 7 at the Mobile World Congress 2010 at Barcelona some hours ago. While we are not likely to see any devices running the new OS until much later in the year, our brief look at the presentation told us quite a few things about the new phone OS. These were the seven we thought were the most notable:
1. A totally new look, which is far more finger-friendly with large icons. Bye, bye, stylus, we really hope.
2. A tile-based interface, which comes into its own when handling social networks. So if there is a tile for your or a friend’s Facebook account, its appearance will change whenever there is an update. Ditto for news and all.
3. There will be sections - or hubs - for social networks (People Hub), photographs (Picture Hub) and work (Office Hub). While the People Hub will keep track of updates on your social networks, the Picture Hub will be about you and your friends’ images online, while the Office Hub will be about office suites and mails.
4. Xbox Live and Zune Player will now come on Windows Phone 7. So you can view gamer’s profiles and scores on your phone and play around with music using the Zune Player’s interface. Complete details have not been released but we can expect more gaming and multimedia muscle on Windows Phone 7.
5. Unlike in recent years, when different vendors placed their own skins over Windows Mobile, they will be unable to do so on Windows Phone 7. So all Windows Phone 7 screens will look more or less alike. Which can be good or bad, but we are going to wait until we get our hands on the interface before we decide.
6. Once again, it is too early to say, but given the structure of Windows Phone 7, we doubt if it would be possible to directly upgrade from Windows Mobil 6, 6.1 or 6.5 to the new version. We hope that we are contradicted.
7. Considering the interface and the amount it depends on networks, we reckon it will have very high hardware requirements, which means initial handsets at least will be on the expensive side.
