Mobile Application Development Company

Mikael Ricknäs, IDG News Service

Microsoft has reinvented its mobile phone operating system, showing a new version Monday at Mobile World Congress designed to make the software company a more viable competitor with Apple and Google.

The Windows Phone 7 series will integrate message, gaming, music, video and productivity software in a way that brings together Microsoft's businesses with Outlook, Xbox, Zune, Office and Bing.

"This is a phone built for people in motion," said Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer in a news conference in Barcelona, Spain. He also acknowledged the company's lack of progress over the past three years. "There's no question in my mind we go back a couple of years that we wanted to think ouf of the box clearly differentiated from our past and clearly different from other things going on in the market," he said.

The phones will not be available for sale until the holiday season this year. Microsoft says it plans to release more details about how developers can build applications for Windows Mobile at its Mix conference in March.

Here is a hail of bullets on the new features of Windows Mobile 7:

• The phone will have capacitive touch screens, meaning screens with pinch and pull technology, and three buttons for Windows, search and back. The demo phone had a touchscreen keyboard, but Microsoft said device makers can design phones with physical keyboards as well.


• The start screen will feature customizable "live tiles," icons that link to contacts, music, messaging, games and photos. The tiles will pull updates from the Web, such as Facebook status changes and new uploaded photos. They can also be edited -- a source of criticism of the Apple iPhone -- and users can create a tile for individual contacts, Web sites and photos.


• Zune and Xbox Live are integrated on each phone. The phone displays your Xbox avatar as a Live Tile. The design of the phone overall mimics the Zune with its large clean type, square tiles and black background.


• The calendar displays Outlook Exchange work items and Web hosted calendar items.


• The search refines results, rather than just returning a list of relevant links as you would see in a Web browser. It automatically returns local results and, for instance, displays phone number, directions and nearby businesses for a specific restaurant.


• The e-mail mirrors many features from Outlook, such as the ability to sort messages based on read and unread, flagged, urgent categories. It also allows multiple deletion of messages.


• Social networks are well integrated, so pulling up a contact also pulls up that person's updates on social networks.


• The Office integration, which is the big differentiator Microsoft has over its competitors, is also redesigned, with a note-taking area, documents screen and Sharepoint integration.


• In general, the software appears to have been designed with the phone, rather than the PC, in mind.


• Devices makers that have signed on to make Windows Phones include HTC, LG, Samsung, Garmin, Asus, HP, Dell and Sony Ericsson.


• Wireless carriers have signed on, including AT&T, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless and Sprint in the U.S. International carriers include Telefonica, Orange and Vodafone.


• Ballmer reiterated Microsoft's business model to license the operating system, rather than go the free route as Google has. He also remains committed to working with device makers and multiple carriers, rather than doing a soup-to-nuts phone like Apple.


• The themes hammered on in the news conference: "A phone is not a PC," "integrated experiences," "smart design," "delight the user."

Adobe went to Spain this week to try to get some love for its Flash software, the dominant platform for viewing Web videos and playing games online.

Flash took a hit in January when Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad tablet, billed as the ultimate multimedia device. Like the iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad when it is released in March won't support Flash. So iPad owners won't be able to watch videos at popular sites such as Hulu, JibJab or Nickelodeon.

On Monday at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Adobe unveiled a beta version of a new mobile Flash Player for software developers and touted support from most of the wireless industry, including Google's Android operating system, Palm, Samsung and Research In Motion's Blackberry.

The Flash Player is on 98% of all computers, including Apple's desktops and laptops. But Adobe can't seem to get Apple support for mobile devices.

Apple declined to comment. Adobe says the conflict has to do with one thing: economics.

Even though the Flash Player is free, "Apple wants to move rich content off the Web and into the App Store, where they can monetize it," says David Wadhwani, vice president of Adobe's platform business unit, which includes Flash.

The App Store is where Apple sells (and gives away) software for the iPhone, iPod Touch and, soon, the iPad. Adobe profits from Flash by selling the software to create programs — and offers a free Flash Player for viewing Flash projects.

The absence of Flash on such high-profile devices doesn't help Adobe, which counts on new software sales and active developer support to keep what Piper Jaffray estimates to be a $600 million Flash business thriving.

Apple is urging developers to get video onto its mobile devices by encoding them in an up-and-coming competitor called HTML5 instead of Flash.

Adobe Flash is "yesterday's technology," says Richard Doherty, an analyst at The Envisioneering Group. He believes Flash is susceptible to hackers and says it hasn't had a major refresh in years.

The future for Flash

But switching is not easy for millions of websites that are created and presented in Flash.

"For a rich-media site like ours, Flash is the only option," says Gregg Spiridellis, a partner at JibJab Media, which makes online greeting cards. "We could support a second platform just to serve the Apple user base, but there are so many more opportunities to grow on the Web, it makes more sense to put our efforts there."

Google's YouTube video site and Vimeo, a competitor, recently opened up HTML5 support with test pages. "We did it as an experiment to see what the response would be," says Andrew Pile, vice president of products for Vimeo.

The pages load more quickly than Flash, but videos can be seen only in Google's Chrome browser and Apple Safari — not Internet Explorer, because it doesn't support HTML5.

"Right now, Internet video is about Flash. That's all there is to it," Pile says. "If you want to see video online, it's in Flash. It works on every kind of computer and browser. Bringing everyone around to HTML5 is going to be a huge leap. I don't see Flash going away any time soon."

In Barcelona, Adobe is showing its new Flash Player 10.1, which the company says is its most advanced yet.

But what took so long? Flash has been around for 13 years, why isn't it seen on many phones?

Wadhwani says computers have stronger processors and memory capacity and getting Flash to run effectively on mobile devices "has taken quite a bit of effort."

The current mobile version, Flash Lite, "could have worked on an iPhone," he says. "It plays most Web content but not all Web content."

Apple has survived consumer angst over the lack of Flash on the iPhone, but Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster isn't so sure it will have a clear ride with the iPad.

"For the first six months, it won't matter, because people will buy the iPad anyway," he says. "Then we'll see what happens."

Ross MacMillan, an analyst at Jeffries & Co., says the scuffle with Apple won't hurt Adobe in the long run, because the player is free. "Adobe will still sell its software to creative professionals to create for the Web," he says.

"Every person in the world would have to buy an iPad for Flash to go away," Munster says. "And we don't see that happening."

Source: usatoday.com