Playtime with WP7

The last two days have been verry intersting and packed with loads of fun. I've spent the time at dmexco, biggest german m,arketing fair/exhibition.Interesting talks, important meetings and stuff...

One of the bigger booths was of the Microsoft Advertising team (Bing, MSN, Ciao.de and the likes). Loads of fun things there, including a couple of Microsot Surface touchscreen tables (wich are awesome btw), XBox360 with Video Kinect Set-Top-Box (absolutely want one!) and a two-and-a-half-Meter-diagonal Flatscreen (for playing XBox, you know). So I stopped by on wednesday and asked for someone with a Windows Phone 7 Handset - they didn' have one there. Which did not came as a surprise as this is an advertisement fair (CPC, specs, Unique Visitors and stuff is what counts here) but said "maybe the other day". So I came back yesterday and here's what I got:

They had an LG GW910 (Panther) QWERTY-Slider with all specs, Microsoft is dictating (Buttons, Screensize, CPU, 4-Point-Multitouch, ...) which will never ake it to market anyway as this is a "developer device". I asked a lot of questions and even played with it on my own. 3G was horrible there so it was kind of an offline-demo. First things first: the device (and WP7) is FAST! I mean awesome-kind-of-FAST! Impressive, indeed. And it looks clean, good. I think one still has to get used to the UI, but it's good. Handling of the physical device is not so important as it will never get into the hands of customers but it felt good as well. Rotating the screen (using G-Sensor) was fast but did not allways work the first try. Software (OS) was "Version 0.8", so not final. Overall I have to say that I am deeply impressed, but not completly sold to platform yet (as some may know MeeGo looks interesting to me as well).

Here are some more tidbits about WP7, the launch and the 'ecosystem':

• Launch partnes will be HTC (who would have thought that...), LG (big player for WP7), Samsung (if I am not mistaking) and Dell (this is the awseome-looking lightning though my contact was uncertain about a Dell device at launch-time)
• No date was told, but mid-october makes a whole lot of sense
• Up to 12 (!) devices would be available at launch on different carriers
  
• In Germany there will be exclusive devices: every device could (in theory) be purchhased from every operator, but one big operator (read: T-Mobile Germany) will get some mor love than the others
  
• The WP7 Marketplace is going to be "managed" (think apple-like, oposed to android-like). This comes to no surprise and only time will tell whether this is a good thing or not
• Only ODM's and operators will be allowed to add applications and Hubs to out-of-the-box
• There might be a chance for a few WP7 devices to be sold via the operaters directly with their own branding (think of an XDA Diamond / MDA Compact IV aka HTC Touch Diamond)
• HTC Sense (on WM 6.x) had to be amortised after 4 month
• For that reason HTC was kind of happy to not having to maintain the suite on the new platfform
• No ODM was unhappy about the design restrictions on WP7 (at least that's what I was told)

So why am I still skeptical about WP7?

• To me it's pretty much apples approach to market (dictating everything, lots of cotroll mechanisms, etc)
• That does not leave so much freedom for heavy users (not even speaking of cooking a ROM for WP7)
• OS and applications will probably verry "data-hungry"
  

If you have any questions, just ask me (here or on twitter)