Ask HN: Will the Windows Phone 7 succeed? Why or why not? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Will the Windows Phone 7 succeed? Why or why not?

3 pointsrakkhi3 comments

Windows 7 phone goes gold recently and scheduled for October launch. Considering how underwhelming the Blackberry torch has been, would anyone seriously pay money for a Windows 7 phone unless they were forced to for work etc i.e. the current Blackberry situation.

Breaking it down:

Design - maybe, I do like the sharp edges and blocky shapes

Performance - don't know yet.. if it is like the Torch it will fail

OS - I have serious doubts without a complete fresh sheet of paper whether Windows 7 will work on this form factor

Apps - serious doubts here on MS ability to excite develpers and present a critical mass of apps especially on launch

Disruptive awesome features - I didn't see anything here: http://bit.ly/95Yus9 . Social media etc is so parse. XBOX live ... are you really going to play XBOX games on your phone? Zume for music.... it plays music so does everything else, last.fm app....Office.. I have Documents to go app... Mail.. Gmail and native mail apps with Exchange via activesync

Price - maybe - depends on whether MS views this like the XBOX and are willing to loose millions for a number of years just to beat Apple and Android. Also will depend on carriers

Battery life - maybe... depends on hardware

Screen resoultion - again hardware

Security - maybe again

Enterprise ready - iPhone / Android have activesync, security via Junos Pulse / Sybase Aferia, documents to go is fine

I though it was a bit early to say the war is over: http://bit.ly/9frnyy

Lets see if I am proved wrong but I am betting on a massive flop

While I may end up being in the minority, I think that they'll do just fine.

First, let me clarify that by fine, I don't mean they will be in first place anytime soon (or ever), but rather I'm talking about having a strong userbase and fighting for second place (out of iPhone, Android, Blackberry, WP7).

Really it will come down to two things, Office integration and XBox Live.

The way they've set up the office integration as well as integrating with sharepoint and exchange will IMO win over a lot of business folks who are starting to tire of the Blackberry.

To dismiss the XBox Live features with "are you really going to play XBOX games on your phone" is extremely misleading, you aren't meant to be playing full xbox games on your phone, the games that you will be playing are more akin to the XBox live arcade games that integrate nicely to the XBox live services (ie leader-boards, achievements, and the like).

on top of that, there is the rumors (a little far fetched I admit) of a partnership between Microsoft and Nokia which certainly wouldn't hurt.

The W7 phone is an immature device on an immature OS in a market with mature devices and mature OS.

Google Chrome iterated through six versions in the entire time Internet Explorer went from v7 to v8, and Android moves as fast as Chrome. The W7 phone is missing critical features that iOS, Android, and Blackberry already feature. It's trying to break into a mature market with a device that doesn't outshine existing products in ANY way.

Copy/Paste

Multitasking

Electronic Compass

Socket access

Flash, HTML5

NDK

Short version: Everything they offer has been done, better, elsewhere; by the time W7 version 2 rolls out to add features, the other mobile OSs will have futher additions that W7 lacks.. they'll always be playing catch-up.

Yes totally agree.

Having some good discussion with a guy on Quora on how you would measure sucess: http://www.quora.com/Will-the-Windows-Phone-7-succeed-Why-or...

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