Over the last few years the mobile OS industry has, for all intents and purposes, become a two horse race. The first is Apples iOS, which really started the mobile technology race when it debuted in the original iPhone, and made powerful mobile technology available the the masses. The second is Google's Android OS which had a slow start, but backed by most of the powerhouses in the mobile industry like Samsung, HTC and Motorola has quickly taken off to become the most popular smartphone OS in the world. Some might argue that Blackberry and Nokia are also forces to be contended with but in the last year we saw RIM fail with every new phone they released and Nokia throw in the towel on its aging Symbian OS. Unlike RIM which decided to work on developing its own next-gen OS, Nokia chose to adopt Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's mobile OS. Late in 2010 Microsoft announced a new mobile OS named Windows Phone 7. While hailed by tech gurus as a marvelous peice of design the sales of WP7 devices have been far lower than what Microsoft would like. The OS is extremely fluid, highly responsive and most importantly very unique. Rather than have your entire phone based around a plethora of application icons, WP7 uses what Microsoft calls live tiles to give each application a unique way of running and gives users a unique way of interacting with applications. However, even though this OS is both unique and wonderfully designed it has two major short-fallings which have prevented widespread adoption in the market.
The first is choice of hardware. When choosing how to manage the harware for their devices Micrsoft decided to take a path between Android and iOS licensing out their software to OEM's (Original Equipment Manufacturers) while setting minimum standards the devices have to meet. So now all the phones that release tend to have the exact same internals with by-and-large similar externals, giving consumers little choice in unique hardware. This should change with the "Tango" update which promises to support a much greater range of hardware from manufacturers.
The second, far more important problem is branding. When Microsoft released Windows Vista it was maligned by the world as the worst piece of software till date and was the cause for Windows' XP's longevity. Far worse however, was the negative connotation it brought to the Windows brand. When I recommend WP7 to many people their immediate reaction was "but it's Windows" and it takes me a long time to convince them that apart from the name the two have nothing in common. With WP7 Microsoft took a great OS and have effectively doomed by giving it the "Windows" moniker. Instead of telling people that "It's the phone to save us from our phones" they should focus more on making it clear that this is the opposite of Windows as you have come to know it. It is simple, intuitive and an excellent OS, one most people would truly be happy to have on their phones. Microsoft never really apologized to people for the trainwreck that was Vista. With WP7 the have the opportunity to really change the landscape of the mobile industry, maing it more competitve in a way that is truly going to benefit all of us as consumers. They have shown the right step by incorporating a large part of WP7 into Windows 8, trying to unify the mobile and desktop experience and I believe in the long run they are going to succeed, but not until they realize the impact their marketing is having on the sale of their phones and change their attitude.
Their partnership with Nokia is going to be huge for their vision of the future, and though I chose to go with Android (I nearly chose the Nokia Lumia 800) I'm rooting for Microsoft in this race. I hope that a year from now I can write about the three horse race in the mobile space but until then I am going to keep reminding people about this lost gem and hope Microsoft can learn from their mistakes last year.
Windows Phone 7 is a beautiful operating system and I would reccomend it at the drop of a hat. For anyone looking to purchase a new phone I suggest looking into Windows Phone devices as they offer excellent value, most of them coming in at around Rs. 20,000 and offering the same, if not better performance than high-end Android phones and the iPhone 4S.
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