Windows Phone 7 and Genealogy Apps

Last month I mentioned that Windows Phone 7 had been released to manufacturing. Today at Mobile World Congress, Microsoft officially launched Windows Phone 7, with several companies showing off their products, as well as a demonstration by Microsoft employees.

Some articles and videos to give you an idea of Windows Phone 7
* Micrsoft’s offical press information and videos
* NBC interview with Steve Ballmer
* Windows Phone Central Video hands-on #1
* Windows Phone Central Video hands-on #2

My impressions so far from what I’m seeing: Microsoft needs to work on their presentation and their advertising. The presentation was lacking, and I’m surprised they had such a small, dimly-lit presentation area at MWC. Their advertising also makes no sense, because it only actually highlights the phone for a few seconds at the end of the ads. The rest of the ad focuses on people being so engrossed in competing phones that they are walking into things, having accidents, and ignoring the people around them. Trying to make that a flaw of other phones would sound like a winning strategy, but you have to spend more than a few seconds actually showcasing your own phone. Apple has the best mobile phone advertising – they show you a lot of what can be done with them and everybody has seen them and it’s easy to grasp in just 15 seconds. Microsoft’s advertising looks like somebody come up with a catchy idea to start with and then couldn’t come up with a way to end it.

There’s nothing wrong with mocking the competition, as long as you actually spend some time showing off your own product. Saying “buy our phone so you won’t be walking into trees or other people” and spending the majority of the ad on that aspect, rather than just 5-10 seconds, and not giving a compelling reason to actually buy into Windows Phone 7 shows that Microsoft is out of touch with consumers.

What they should have done is spend 5-10 seconds showing people being distracted and walking into stuff while trying to find something on their phone, and then spend 20 seconds showing some interesting features. Show people Windows Phone 7 in action for a long enough time for them to understand what it is. There are a lot of reasons why Apple has done so well in the mobile market, and their advertising is one of them.

This is a complete overhaul of their mobile OS, and they are not as dominant as they once were. They are having to play catchup to Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android platforms, and from the start they are missing features that are now taken for granted. These are simple features – cut & paste, multi-tasking, tethering, and quite a few others that aren’t as big. Microsoft has plenty of explanations about why some of these features are missing. They did state that cut & paste would be available sometime in “early 2011″ and that it will be a free update. The only explanation I can come up with is that they were looking to beat certain deadlines. Some of these features were present on Windows Mobile 6.5 which makes this even more confusing. With all of that said, I’m hoping that it succeeds in the long run. Apple and Google could use the competition.

If you are curious about Windows Phone 7 and genealogy, Mark Tucker, with Shazaml Design, LLC, and also ThinkGenealogy, has one of the first genealogy-related apps for Windows Phone 7. It’s called “Cousin Calculator” and it’s exactly what it sounds like – a relationship calculator.

Here’s a video he put together showing it off:
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Windows Phone 7 – Released to Manufacturing

Today, the Microsoft Windows Phone Team has announced that they have released Windows Phone 7 to Manufacturing. Back in July, Microsoft released a technical preview.

Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft’s next generation of mobile operating systems, set to replace Windows Mobile 6.5, complete with new branding a name change to Windows Phone 7. The name change is both to move it forward version wise, as well as to tie it to the success of Microsoft’s Windows 7 on the desktop and laptop platforms. Windows Phone 7 features a new interface, a new browser, and a more coherent design through the OS. It will also feature a better software update process.

With the Release to Manufacturing (RTM), this marks the integration of the software with the final phone/mobile device hardware that manufacturers and mobile/cell phone network providers will be releasing to consumers later this year.

On the Windows Phone 7 blog, they mention the testing it went through:

Windows Phone 7 is the most thoroughly tested mobile platform Microsoft has ever released. We had nearly ten thousand devices running automated tests daily, over a half million hours of active self-hosting use, over three and a half million hours of stress test passes, and eight and a half million hours of fully automated test passes. We’ve had thousands of independent software vendors and early adopters testing our software and giving us great feedback. We are ready.

For the full story, see the Windows Team Blog

Adobe Flash and the iPhone/iPad

Somebody who knows my fondness for gadgets asked me the other day about the whole Adobe Flash thing on the iPhone (or rather the lack of). They wanted to know if it would be a problem, since they were considering purchasing an iPhone.

In my view, it hasn’t been a problem and I’ve been an iPhone owner for quite a while now. There are 50 million iPhones and half a million iPads floating around that don’t run Flash, and none of the iPhone’s current competitors support Flash either. I’ve had an iPhone for quite a while now, and it’s been a long time since I ran into a site that wouldn’t work on an iPhone. As a Windows Mobile and a Palm user in the past, I hated visiting certain sites on those devices simply because there was no thought given to mobile users and a lot of sites wouldn’t work on those devices. With the popularity of the iPhone, that’s all changed, and it benefits everybody on a mobile platform, because website designers and maintainers now take mobile devices into account. It helps that the mobile data networks have gotten better as well.

The majority of genealogy-related sites I visit on my iPhone are blogs anyways and usually have little to no Flash. I tied to shy away from some genealogy sites that are heavy on the bandwidth as my connection is usually not the best for dealing with such sites. Here in 2009-2010, we have it incredibly good though – we are getting browsers and screen resolutions that allow us to actually be able to browse the web in a productive manner.

As to why it’s not allowed, I think it boils down to Apple doesn’t want another company to build a development layer on top of the iPhone, because at that point it stops being an Apple mobile platform and it becomes an Adobe mobile platform. I think there are plenty of other solid reasons – HTML5 (Wikipedia) would be better in the long run since it’s an open standard, and most of us have probably suffered through problems involving Adobe’s Flash plug-in. I’m well aware that Adobe has been working to fix those problems on Windows and Mac OS X with the latest major releases, but I really like the idea of HTML5 getting rid of the need for third party plug-ins. I don’t play Flash-based games though, so my experiences are definitely not going to be the same as others.

I’ve read both sides of the argument, and both make valid points, but I would rather a lot of sites move to HTML5, because I like the idea of not worrying about what mobile device I’m using and whether I have this or that level of plug-in.

Being a genealogist I’m always a fan of open standards as well which would firmly put me in the HTML5 camp, and I’m a fan of anything that causes web designers to take a step back and look at things from the point of view of somebody on a small mobile device whether it’s an iPhone, Android, Palm, or Windows Mobile (Windows Phone 7).

G.L.