Windows Phone 7 Upcoming Features Videos

As Todd wrote last night, Microsoft has demoed a number of features that will be coming to Windows Phone 7 at the Mobile World Congress conference, going on now in Barcelona. Amongst the features is integration with Kinect, multitasking, and Internet Explorer 9. Engadget has consolidated videos of the demos on one page, making it easier for us to watch the specific features. Frankly, the only feature that I am interested in is multitasking, but unfortunately the demonstration of it doesn't show why I think multitasking is needed on Windows Phone 7. In the demo you see fast switching between games, which is nice, but isn't multitasking. Real multitasking has the computing device running multiple tasks (process, apps, whichever you prefer to think of them as) at the same time. In my opinion, switching between games that pause is not a demonstration of multitasking. To be fair, the demo does go on to show Slacker Radio playing music in the background, which is a demonstration of multitasking. The primary reason why I think multitasking is needed in Windows Phone 7 is to update social networking apps like Twitter in the background. Current Twitter apps on Windows Phone 7 all have the same problem in that when you first start the app you have to wait for it to retrieve updates to your Twitter timeline. How Twitter works on Android is that it constantly retrieves updates in the background, so when I open a Twitter app, I see my current timeline almost instantly. In my opinion, the Internet Explorer 9 Windows Phone 7 demo did not show its most important mobile benefit, support for HTML5, which enables development and use of sophisticated web apps on the phone. Instead, Microsoft showed the performance gains with their Fish Tank demo, which is interesting, but frankly, I don't spend a lot of time watching flying objects in my mobile web browser. The bottom line is that while it is nice to see Microsoft working on improvements, they are delivering too slowly. The long-since promised update that adds cut, copy, and paste to Windows Phone 7 is already months behind the expected December time frame. Microsoft's execution, combined with the announcement of the new partnership with Nokia, indicates to me that they still don't get the smartphone market. If Microsoft thinks the problem with Windows Phone 7 is hardware, they are in for a rude awakening.

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Windows Phone 7 Upcoming Features Videos

Frank McPherson

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Frank McPherson