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Windows Phone 7 Launches in Australia

by Nick 11. October 2010 23:02

Microsoft Australia held it’s press events this morning in a rather obscure venue to officially launch Windows Phone 7 into the Australian market with devices to be available on the 21st of October. Whilst there were the usual presentations from Microsoft and the launch carrier Telstra, it was the feature demos that really took the show. Having worked with the platform for over 6 months now there wasn’t much new material but it was great to see the range of slick looking devices being rolled out later in the month.

What frustrates me is how useless the Australian telcos are. All three of the majors, Optus, Vodafone and Telstra are carrying Windows Phone 7 devices but not one of them has bothered to update their consumer website with information about the phones. To make matters worse, the main page of all three sites are still going on about the fact iphone 4 “changes everthing again” (no it doesn’t, Apple haven’t innovated in 4 generations of the phone….)

If you go to the Telstra site you get an iphone4 ad on the consumer pages. You do however get a Windows Phone 7 ad on the business page. Did I miss something? Isn’t this launch about the consumer, not the business user?

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Comments (3) -

10/13/2010 8:48:38 PM #

" Apple haven’t innovated in 4 generations of the phone…"

That's a bit tough Nick. The way Apple has done multitasking is somewhat innovative. The antenna in the frame is somewhat innovative. The high DPI display is innovative.

And if Apple isn't being innovative then MS must be being anti-innovative with the removal of copy and paste ;-). BTW, WP7 looks really good and does seem innovative (tiles, hubs).

Hope all is going well.

Cheers,
Ashley.

Ashley |

10/14/2010 2:29:04 PM #

Hey Ashley,

Great to hear from you - yes, things are going really well, especially since Microsoft have decided to come back into the mobile space. Are you still doing work for the uni here in Perth?

Yes, you're right I suppose there are definite elements of evolution in what Apple have done. Note that I use evolution, rather than innovation for two reasons. Firstly, the three points you mentioned are all things that Apple had to resolve in order to move forward with the iphone platform. It's not true multi-tasking in the sense that your application can continue to run in the background and with the exception of certain tasks is actually very similar to what MS are doing with WP7 and the back-stack. Having the antenna in the frame isn't actually at all innovative since it's been done for years in laptops (especially since it's a complete hardware fail - kinda surprised you touted that as innovative since it's something that's caused them no end of grief). Pushing up the DPI on the device is one way to ensure that the iphon always sells for a premium - again an evolution rather than innovation in my opinion.

The second reason I think of most of these changes as an evolution is that from a consumer point of view most of these changes either go unnoticed or the user doesn't actually care about them. Whilst advanced users need/want multi-tasking and the ability to switch between applications, most users I've seen still press the home button and click on the application they want, even if it's already running. What I would have liked Apple to have done is spend more cycles trying to link parts of the UI together or provide extension points for applications to be launched from parts of the core UI. I think this is an area that all three smartphone platforms will need to invest in - Android probably leads this area with the concept of intents.

It's definitely going to be an interesting 6-12 months as all the smartphone platforms continue to evolve and try to out-innovate each other.

nick |

11/24/2010 5:18:35 AM #