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The Boy Genius Report got hold of a new Motorola Q9 phone with Wi-Fi and were surprised to see that it is running Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard. Hit the link for commentary and 100 pictures, but the changes while pleasant aren’t that large since it is a point release. The most popular around the phone gadget sites seems to be the threaded SMS.
Coincidently, another 6.1 appeared last week, Microsoft Office Mobile 6.1 which was finally released after having been shipped and then withdrawn in September. The biggest change is support for the Open Office XML (OOXML) document formats introduced with Office 2007. Other enhancements are:
One other change - Windows Mobile users pining for Office Mobile but left bereft by their carriers can now buy Office Mobile 6.1 direct from Microsoft for $50 via Handango.com.
Today, Microsoft’s PlayReady digital rights management offering (announced last February) found its first non-Microsoft customer, Nokia, who plans to add support for it on their S60 and Series 40 mobile device platforms. Don’t hold your breath, though:
Microsoft today launched Robotics Studio 1.5 adding support for Windows Embedded CE 6.0 and Windows Mobile 6, “which allows developers to more easily deploy advanced scenarios and software applications on embedded platforms of a wider variety and lower cost.” Among other enhancements were:
… improvements to its visual programming language and 3-D real-world-physics-based visual simulation environment, built on the AGEIA Technologies Inc.-based PhysX engine. New services have also been added, including support for vision and speech recognition, expanded documentation and a new editor that makes it easier to configure and target software services for robotics platforms.
Robotics Studio 1.5 is free and available for download here. A variety of marketing programs were announced as well.
Today at 6PM (in each time zone) Apple’s iPhone will be launched in the USA and the hype is incredibly thick (cf. this compilation of iPhone news stories). The early iPhone reviews were universally favorable and barring any last minute disasters it looks like the iPhone is on its way to being a hit not just for its technology features, but also for the way it is shaking up the traditional cell phone business.
As disturbing as this is for the current US mobile phone carriers, no one expects the Apple and AT&T combination to dominate the industry like the iPod dominates MP3 players. In the first place, the iPhone is a pricey single carrier smartphone when smartphones are little more than 10% of the market. Second, its credentials for business use (which is a large part of the smartphone market) are a trifle suspect or at least unproven and Gartner isn’t sure that Apple will ever support the corporate market.
I find the “Apple won’t support enterprises” view a trifle myopic since Apple will support whatever they need to in order to make money - if not today, then in due course. To that end there were rumors this week that Apple will license Exchange ActiveSync in order to improve compatibility with Microsoft’s Exchange email server and that today’s Exchange 2007 update may also be partly directed at iPhone compatibility.
As for Microsoft, besides having a new mobile client for its various server and Web offerings, they now have an additional competitor for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6 in the smartphone space. The iPhone is not a direct competitor, of course, but a competitor for all the phone vendors licensing Windows Mobile. That is a situation eerily reminiscent of Microsoft’s deceased Portable Media Center offering whose OEMs were sunk by the iPod leading Microsoft to attempt to do it themselves with the Zune. It’s not even close to “Zune Phone” time yet, but you can bet that both Microsoft and Apple are thinking about the prospect.
As anticipated, Microsoft today launched Windows Live Hotmail worldwide with a spiffy new AJAX interface and the intent of retiring its venerable MSN Hotmail which has over 280 million users. Some key aspects:
There are more new features and aside from the nomenclature madness, this all seems worthwhile, but now begins the long transition of existing users which Major anticipates will be complete by November. I can’t help but observe that the transition would be faster if they had the Outlook Connector and the new Live Mail client ready now.
Update: Ina Fried has an interesting Hotmail background story that reveals that the new AJAX interface was deemed too slow, particularly on dial-up lines, and that was the reason that an updated “classic” interface was reintroduced to the final product at some delay.
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