Yesterday, Microsoft launched their new mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7. As a former enterprise network administrator, and Windows Mobile user, I can tell you that Microsoft does have a place in the smartphone world. Redmond fell asleep at the wheel on their mobile development over the last 6-7 years and let RIM and Apple come in and essentially run them out of the mobile game. With Apple’s “fenced in” strategy, many power users who resist that model were left with few viable options in the way of hand-held devices. Google acknowledged this opportunity in 2005 by purchasing Android Inc. It wasn’t until October of 2008 that we were able to purchase the first available Android device. According to a report released by the NPD group, Android accounted for 33 precent of the smartphone sales last quarter. For an operating system that was only released two years ago, that is an impressive figure to say the least.
Andy Rubin, vice president of Engineering at Google, was quoted recently as saying the following regarding WP7:
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On a smaller scale, the relative beginnings of the smart phone(PDA) industry have gotten started similarly to the progression of the PC market. Two of the same major players are involved, taking familiar tacts, and there is a third open-source alternative headed up by a new major player that didn’t exist during the PC’s early days. Does anyone find it incredibly interesting that three of the largest, most influential technology companies (i.e. Microsoft, Apple and Google) are now in control of the smartphone/mobile operating system industry? This fact tells us so much about the future of technology and where we can expect to see the biggest leaps made over the next 5-10 years.
For those of you who paid attention while Microsoft and Apple divided up the computer industry 30 years ago, the similarities should be pretty obvious. Out of the three companies Microsoft entered the ring first with Windows Mobile and sold their product as software that could run on any manufacturers hardware (to a certain extent). Apple later came to market with a more user friendly and consumer appealing product that was a hardware/software combination, the iPhone. A good deal later, an open-source alternative was released that offered a more developer friendly platform and could save the corporate and consumer markets millions(billions?) of dollars, Android.
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Google really surprised me when they released their own mobile operating system. Why do I say that? Because Google was always supposed to put out a web-based OS, one that you would access through nothing more than a web browser. This was what we all were anticipating 5 years ago. That still has not become a reality, but they are really making waves in the mobile world. Here is the latest list of improvements to Android 1.5:
Overall User Interface Improvements for:
- In-call experience
- Contacts, Call log, and Favorites
- SMS & MMS
- Browser
- Gmail
- Calendar
- Email
- Camera & Gallery
- Application management
Performance improvements
- Faster Camera start-up and image capture
- Much faster acquisition of GPS location (powered by SUPL AGPS)
- Smoother page scrolling in Browser
- Speedier GMail conversation list scrolling
New features
- On-screen soft keyboard
- Works in both portrait and landscape orientation
- Support for user installation of 3rd party keyboards
- User dictionary for custom words
- Home screen
- Widgets
- Bundled home screen widgets include: analog clock, calendar, music player, picture frame, and search
- Live folders
- Camera & Gallery
- Video recording
- Video playback (MPEG-4 & 3GP formats)
- Bluetooth
- Stereo Bluetooth support (A2DP and AVCRP profiles)
- Auto-pairing
- Improved handsfree experience
- Browser
- Updated with latest Webkit browser & Squirrelfish Javascript engines
- Copy ‘n paste in browser
- Search within a page
- User-selectable text-encoding
- UI changes include:
- Unified Go and Search box
- Tabbed bookmarks/history/most-visited screen
- Contacts
- Shows user picture for Favorites
- Specific date/time stamp for events in call log
- One-touch access to a contact card from call log event
- System
- New Linux kernel (version 2.6.27)
- SD card filesystem auto-checking and repair
- SIM Application Toolkit 1.0
- Google applications
- View Google Talk friends’ status in Contacts, SMS, MMS, GMail, and Email applications
- Batch actions such as archive, delete, and label on Gmail messages
- Upload videos to Youtube
- Upload photos on Picasa
Yesterday, Microsoft launched their new mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7. As a former enterprise network administrator, and Windows Mobile user, I can tell you that Microsoft does have a place in the smartphone world. Redmond fell asleep at the wheel on their mobile development over the last 6-7 years and let RIM and Apple come in and essentially run them out of the mobile game. With Apple’s “fenced in” strategy, many power users who resist that model were left with few viable options in the way of hand-held devices. Google acknowledged this opportunity in 2005 by purchasing Android Inc. It wasn’t until October of 2008 that we were able to purchase the first available Android device. According to a report released by the NPD group, Android accounted for 33 precent of the smartphone sales last quarter. For an operating system that was only released two years ago, that is an impressive figure to say the least.
mobile, operating systems | admin | 
October 12, 2010 10:39 am | 
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