I Hate to Admit It But the Interface for Windows Phone 7 Looks Great
While I haven’t played with it yet the screenshots I’m seeing of the Windows Phone 7 look great. I’m an Apple fanboy at heart but it’s a wonderful surprise to see that Microsoft didn’t just do an iPhone clone. This isn’t enough to make me switch from my iPhone, however it is enough to make me have second thoughts about switching to Android and it also convinces me now more than ever that Palm won’t live to see the end of the year. From what I’ve read the Windows team has been working on this for 18 months and they decided to focus on the app side of the phone which is their core strength:
Look at that: Office looks sexy! Office hasn’t looked sexy to me since I first encountered it on the Mac eons ago as an alternative to what was out there in the DOS world. A common complaint about Microsoft is that you can get some great products like the Xbox but you can also get some clunkers too. Here it looks like Microsoft put the Xbox team to work, and this screen hints that they understand that games are important on mobile (something they have been sky about in the past):
Now I’ll grant you that this is just the demo, and I’ve seen a few ugly interface screens. However if the actual phone is anything close to this video it’s going to be worth checking out:
This next screen shot which shows the HTC HD2 (available in the US in “early 2010”) looks a bit too Apple like to me, however that said it looks much better than any Android interface that I’ve seen:
And lastly it’s just a superficial thing but even the idea of Microsoft hiring Isaac Mizrahi to design an opening screen if brilliant. Suddenly you have Microsoft becoming “cool” while Google looks geeky (and in bad way):
My only gripe as a designer is that once again Flash is locked out of another mobile platform. What makes me depressed about this is that Flash use to work on Windows Mobile, so it’s clearly not an oversight that Microsoft is out to screw Adobe. Like Apple with video it seems that Microsoft wants to push Silverlight which bodes ill for those of us who are good at Flash. My understanding is that Adobe is working on having AIR on every platform but the iPhone, but that misses the point of using Flash in the first place: The idea of write once, run anywhere.
Update: According to Gabriel Tellez the interface for Windows Phone 7 is based upon the Zune.