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It’s a bit anticlimactic since Microsoft had to unveil Windows Mobile 6 (codenamed Crossbow) last week due to a French press leak, but now as originally planned, Microsoft Reveals New Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone Software:
BARCELONA, Spain — Feb. 12, 2007 — Microsoft Corp. today unveiled Windows Mobile® 6, the newest version of its mobile software platform. By improving usability and adding support for Microsoft® Office features previously available only on PCs, Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 delivers to the small screen a familiar and rich experience that meets the needs of work and life while on the go, all with a single device.
More details by following the link including
Windows Mobile 6 comes fresh on the heels of a successful year that saw Microsoft’s worldwide converged mobile device shipments grow 135.3 percent (year over year) in 2006, according to leading IT market research and advisory firm IDC. The industry is fast taking notice of Microsoft in the wireless arena and realizing the business benefits of Windows Mobile devices, resulting in IDC’s expectation that Windows Mobile will experience the largest growth of any mobile operating system worldwide, at 75.6 percent, through the year 2010.
Some perspective from Dan Frommer at Forbes:
Unlike Windows’ dominance in personal computing, Microsoft’s U.S. cellphone market share isn’t much–about 1% in November 2006, according to research firm M:Metrics. But that represents 2 million people, and it’s more than double its share two years ago. Last fall, it passed rival Palm OS in the U.S.
Worldwide, Microsoft sold 9 million Windows Mobile licenses last year, on devices from 47 different manufacturers and 115 mobile operators in 55 countries. Last quarter, the company sold 3 million licenses, up more than 90% from a year ago.
And the market is growing: In 2007, people will buy more than a billion cellphones worldwide, according to Yankee Group, with smartphones accounting for more than 113 million, or 11% of all phones sold. In 2010, Yankee Group projects smartphone sales to top 243 million, or 20% of all phone sales.
Microsoft doesn’t sell its own phones–yet–but handset companies like Motorola and HTC pay the company a license fee for each Windows Mobile phone they make.
Well they do now, but the rumored Zune Phone changes all the bets.
The ink on last year’s Microsoft Zune press releases was barely dry when speculation started about a Zune Phone egged on by CEO Steve Ballmer. Now the rumors are heating up again after John Letzing at MarketWatch spotted a likely FCC filing. However, reading the fine print reveals a strange duck that is “an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) device to be used for ‘consumer broadband access and networking.’” The general suspicion is that this means WiMAX which is a high bandwidth wireless technology that is just getting off the ground. To add to the mystery, Google, HP, and Intel are listed as a supporters of the FCC application.
However, Matt Hickey at CrunchGear fans the flames with the speculation that a Zune phone would run on a high speed 4G WiMAX network like the one to be built by Sprint/Nextel. This lash-up could provide a mobile VoIP offering plus the likely ability to use ordinary Wi-Fi hotspots. Even better, CrunchGear’s inside sources say that the Zune phone will be announced in March and shipped in May thus neatly upstaging Apple’s iPhone.
All of this is certainly exciting, but the idea of a Zune Phone brings up the more fundamental question of where it would leave Microsoft’s Windows Mobile partners who are ready to show off their new Windows Mobile 6 handsets next week at 3GSM. Microsoft’s Zune crew apparently has license to run roughshod over other parts of Microsoft and their partnerships as evidenced by the hapless PlaysForSure partners (e.g. Creative Technologies, iRiver, Samsung) who got blindsided by the Zune portable media player itself last year. A Zune Phone in whatever form hits right at the phone vendors who have signed up for Windows Mobile (e.g. Samsung, Palm, HTC, Motorola, LG) just when it was showing signs of success, at least in the USA. Beyond the technical particulars, the real Zune Phone question then is whether Microsoft is willing yet again to shutter one of their own projects and cannibalize their partners’ markets in favor of rolling their own.
Update: Microsoft says FCC filing not Zune-related. Fair enough, but as long as the Zune Phone remains a possibility there will still be an inherent conflict with Windows Mobile.
Windows Mobile 6.0 (codenamed Crossbow) has been available to phone manufacturers since November 2006, but will get its formal public introduction on Monday according to Ina Fried at CNET:
Microsoft plans on Monday to officially announce Windows Mobile 6, formerly code-named Crossbow, at the 3GSM trade show in Barcelona. The first devices using the software aren’t expected until spring, however, with the bulk of products using the new operating system likely to come in the second half of the year.
Among the most visible changes is the ability to type in a few letters of a song, contact or e-mail subject and have the phone automatically show only matching results. The software also supports HTML e-mail. But for Exchange messages to be viewable in that form, a company also has to have Exchange 2007, the new version of Microsoft’s e-mail server software.
Windows Mobile 6 also builds in support for Windows Live instant messaging and e-mail, which enables users to see whether a contact is online and to get their Hotmail or Windows Live Mail messages pushed down automatically.
After years of struggling to make inroads in the phone business, Microsoft is starting to find its way. Its software is now on many of Palm’s Treo devices and also on new, slim phones like Samsung’s BlackJack and T-Mobile’s Dash. The company sold 3 million licenses of Windows Mobile last quarter, up 90 percent from a year earlier.
Because it uses the same core–Windows CE 5–the new mobile operating system is expected to work with nearly all the existing Windows Mobile 5 applications.
That’s also why some have called Crossbow Windows Mobile 5 Second Edition. The next big change in Windows Mobile is coming with Photon which is about a year away.
There are more details on Crossbow in the CNET report including that support for Office 2007 file formats will not arrive until the summer. Also there has been a nomenclature change:
Pocket PC Phone Edition, for touch screens, becomes Windows Mobile Professional, while Smartphone edition, for non touch screens, becomes Windows Mobile Standard. A third version, Windows Mobile Classic, is designed for PDAs without phone capabilities, an increasingly small slice of the market.
Photon is also supposed to finally unify the Pocket PC and Smartphone editions (by whatever name) which today generally require the development of two different versions of applications.
Update: Matthew Miller at ZDNet has a nice mini review and Jay Greene at BusinessWeek.com puts it all in perspective:
For Microsoft, the mobile phone business has been marked more by defeats than victories. When it pushed into the business in 2002, handset makers and mobile phone carriers balked, worried that the software giant would try to marginalize partners, squeezing the lion’s share of profits for itself just as it has in the PC business. What’s more, its software was clunky, and a battery hog to boot, making devices running it unappealing.
The turning point came in September, 2005, when Microsoft convinced longtime rival Palm to put Windows Mobile inside its popular Treo device. Microsoft Senior Vice-President Pieter Knook calls it a “watershed moment” for Windows Mobile’s legitimacy. Over time, the company became more willing to let handset makers and carriers define the customer experience, as long as users tapped into e-mail servers running Microsoft’s Exchange software.
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Those improvements, along with the global familiarity with Microsoft’s software, helped it leapfrog BlackBerry. IDC’s estimates for 2006 worldwide market share for so-called converged devices—mobile phones that can handle e-mail and surf the Web—put Microsoft’s share at 9.8%, compared with 7.3% for BlackBerry. Still, BlackBerry held the U.S. lead through the first nine months of 2006, with a 49.4% share versus Windows Mobile’s 29% share. And worldwide, both significantly trail Nokia-backed Symbian, the mobile-operating system that’s huge in Europe and Japan.
Anton Kotov does the honors at Mobile-Review with plenty of screenshots. Excerpts:
Nevertheless, the brand-new operating system could be called “Windows Mobile 5.0 Second Edition” for it lacks tons of all-new features and total system revamp as in the case of Windows Mobile 5.0. The most considerable upgrades are coming up in the next version, being developed under the codename of “Windows Mobile Photon” scheduled for release in two years time at best. Being under the pressure of launches of new products in its software range, including MS Windows Vista, MS Office 2007, MS Exchange 2007, Microsoft had no other choice but release an updated version of Windows Mobile. Most of Windows Mobile 6.0’s new functions are aimed at providing support for what MS Exchange 2007 brings to the table. Here with Crossbow we still have the same division – WM for Pocket PC and WM for Smartphone, which will fade away only in WM Photon. Today we are giving a close-up to the Pocket PC edition, while the operating system for smartphones will be reviewed later.
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The manufacturers are getting RTM version of Windows Mobile Crossbow in November, 2006 – in light of this fact we predict first devices running on WM 6.0 to be released by the end of 2Q, 2007. The list of companies ready to upgrade old devices up to WM 6.0 includes only HP and E-Ten for the time being.
There had been some speculation that Crossbow would end up being Windows Mobile 5.0 Second Edition (or something similar) and Photon would be Windows Mobile 6.0, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. And if you were wondering, Crossbow does have Windows Live Mobile integration.
