Probably that is because - quite objectively - they are coming far too late to the party. In February, Android was still on a meager 8-9 million devices. Now that number is increasing by 200K+ per day. Even if they had released this in February, it wouldn’t have been easy (with iPhone and RIM already big in the market). Now - with three major competitors? I don’t see it happening. What does WP7 offer the targetted manufacturers that they don’t already get “for free” from Android?
Add to this that Microsoft is doing the exact same stupid thing that Google did (i.e., limiting their selling services to a selected few countries - Windows Marketplace, Zune, XBox Live are not scheduled for release in Scandinavia in the near future from what I hear - not even for free downloads). I suspect it will be a very long while before I see anyone sporting a WP7 around here. Even my friends who like Windows Mobile have little interest in this now.
Just to expound on the utter stupidity of this decision.
Scandinavian users will actually be able to view the apps and tunes in the Marketplace - they just won’t be allowed to download anything. So not only is it a worse situation than the one faced by Android early adopters (at least Android has lots of free apps that could be downloaded), they are also rubbing the nose of their users into it.
Add to this that Bing still very much a beta service in its localized version, it becomes very hard to find even one good selling point. Here’s a smart phone - you just can’t use it for anything, you know, smart…
It’s not like MS “announced it”, just that some graphic designer went and put an icon in a graphic that they weren’t supposed to show yet. There wasn’t a press release or anything like that.
Strategy - yeah, the expansion of the international market hasn’t been fast enough. But don’t they have Xbox Live in Scandinavia? The list here (http://www.xbox.com/en-gb/live/countries.htm) says it’s in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Back in January they said the Zune service was coming to Xbox this fall, together with a bunch of new countries. Included on that list were Scandinavian countries (Zune Thoughts: Zune Video Service Coming to Xbox 360 in 18 Countries). Now fall is here, and indeed there are more countries, but the Scandinavian ones are off the list. I wonder what happened?
So how about the win phone for game dev? Anyone mucked with it? It looks like the XNA page is really pushing for it, they even completely redid their home page. Its now the App Hub (http://create.msdn.com/en-US/)
On a side note, does this mean they have fixed the only one device can logon to live at a time annoyance? That was an epic fail that will only get worse with the phone if not fixed.
So I’m at the MS Professional Developers Conference this week, and they gave all of the attendees Windows 7 phones (!). They’re really trying to push phone development and Azure development this year, and honestly I’m pretty excited to try both. Being a .NET geek, you can bet I’ll be experimenting with some W7 Phone apps in no time.
All of that being said, this phone is really quite remarkable. As an iPhone owner, I’m skeptical of most other phones (can’t really stand the non-elegance of Android) so I’m surprised at my own reaction to the W7 phone OS. It’s really hard to describe without trying it out, but the interface is very slick and ‘connected’ across many things. I think I may be swapping my iPhone sim back and forth between the iPhone 4 and this W7 phone for awhile. (For those interested, the phone they gave out is an LG Optimus 7 (european model aka unlocked)). Unfortunately, my cursed micro-sim means I had to order an adapter. So far I’ve just been playing with it on WiFi.
