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Monday, February 15, 2010

Tech The Mobile Wars Heat Up

Posted by Anthony Hecht on Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 1:32 PM

The Mobile World Congress conference is going on in Barcelona right now, and there have been a couple interesting announcements.

First, as expected, was the introduction of the Windows Phone 7 Series (catchy!). There were no 1-6 Series Windows Phones, of course, they just killed off the Windows Mobile brand at 6.5 and are now calling it Windows Phone. As we all know, companies often completely change brands just because they feel like it, not because of image problems.

Microsoft has posted a bunch of videos of the announcement, and here's a quick demo:

It looks fancy, Zune-like, and of course nothing at all like Windows or Windows Mobile. It's impossible to tell how it will be to use in real life, but the demo videos make me worry that their main innovation was to add superfluous animations to absolutely every action. I hope not, because this will become incredibly annoying very quickly.

All I know is they better fucking fix their browser. I already feel like the web developers of the world should have a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft for all the billions of hours wasted patching the bugs in their desktop browsers—if they gain market share in mobile and don't catch up with web standards, I'll... I'll.. you know.

The other interesting demo to check out is Notion Ink's Adam, an Android tablet. It looks quite impressive and has some great ideas—swivel camera, self-adjusting screen, and an interesting backside trackpad.

It's going to be very tough for a small startup like Notion to compete with Apple, but I'd love to see this thing shake things up.

As for Windows Phone 7, I'm skeptical, but at least they're trying.

thanks to Nick for the tip on the Adam

Comments (11) RSS

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"add superfluous animations to absolutely every action"

and that sum's up everything about Microsoft products made in the past 10 years quite nicely.

Posted by Elizabeth I (or Liz Tudor) on February 15, 2010 at 1:47 PM

That regular-screen-to-monochrome-screen-in-sunlight thing is really awesome, and deflates every Kindle user's "You can't read an ebook on a screen in the sun" complaint. (Which seems to be the 2010 version of book-readers saying "You can't read it in the tub"" about the Kindle two years ago.)

Posted by Paul Constant

on February 15, 2010 at 1:50 PM

ADAM, what the iPad should have been.

Posted by Tom on February 15, 2010 at 2:24 PM

@1: Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I think "Brian Eno startup sound" works fairly well, too.

Posted by Chip on February 15, 2010 at 2:26 PM

Speaking of tech, it seems that Apple's going to be using FairPlay DRM for the iBookstore. Lame.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/15/apple…

Posted by Encode on February 15, 2010 at 2:27 PM

oh man- Notion is fucked. Apple's known for being extremely litigious, and they also happen to own the patent on that whole "backside trackpad navigation" thing... so I expect Apple to own Notion any day now.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/…

Posted by UNPAID COMMENTER on February 15, 2010 at 3:37 PM

All the excitement of Zune! (the product I've only seen in the posession of MS employees & spouses).

Plus, this is pathetic vaporware. Not scheduled for release by MS until late this year, and we know what that means.

Pathetic, really pathetic.

Posted by Karlheinz Arschbomber

on February 15, 2010 at 5:17 PM

@3 - Yes, ADAM definitely has better specs. It's too bad that there will be almost no Android apps that take advantage of that screen size until there are millions of them sold, which is likely to be never.

I'm not sure I'd buy an iPad, but if I were a VC, I'd be putting my money on iPad app development, not on Android-tablet app development. No one is making real money developing android phone apps; 90% have been downloaded less than 10,000 times. That makes it that much harder to justify investing in the smaller tablet audience.

Posted by Free Lunch on February 15, 2010 at 5:25 PM

Can't even see the commercial without installing Silverlight. Pass.

Posted by pox on February 15, 2010 at 5:28 PM

@9 -- My sentiments exactly. Couldn't even bring up the main Slog page this evening without getting a Silverlight update message. Booo, Microsoft.

Posted by Sorry, Bill G. on February 16, 2010 at 12:14 AM

Wow, you hipsters know nothing about technology, do you? I could find better informed comments in the dark recesses of Slashdot. Seriously though, leave the tech reporting to people who actually understand the field (readers: follow the link to Gizmodo and stay there). Perhaps then y'all could get around to fixing this janky-ass website.

Posted by Trioculus on February 16, 2010 at 1:07 AM