Windows 7 Phone details

In my last blog post I talked about Windows 7 Phone not having Copy&Paste or Multi-tasking.

Conveniently I found another post that clarifies one of these two issues.

Link

In this article the issue where Microsoft does not plan to include Multi-tasking in the Windows 7 Phone is clarified. The good news is that that it was a false rumor, and that multi-tasking is planned for the Windows 7 Phone. What things will be able to be multi-tasked may be limited, however, multi-tasking will infact be available.

For instance, you will be able to listen to music and use other apps at the same time.

For more info, please read the original article, or this quote:


"Microsoft itself makes use of multitasking in the operating system. For users and developers, an application pauses when the user switches to another program, and the first one could be shut down by the operating system to reclaim CPU or memory resources.
"This was not a quick decision," says Charlie Kindel, partner group program manager for the Windows Phone 7 Developer Experience. Microsoft looked at what it could take to create and use background processing on the phone for developers and users, and the potential impact on the all-important user experience. The conclusion: A lot of infrastructure would have to be built and a lot of added complexity would result.
At the same time, Microsoft executives say the Windows Phone 7 platform provides a range of integrations and services for applications that provide the kind of multitasking users want. For example, if you start a music track on the WP7 device, it will continue playing if you switch from the music application to another one. The "live tiles" in the UI -- the intelligent rectangles and squares that can be linked to phone or cloud-based services and applications -- coupled with Microsoft's free push notification service for Windows Phone provide a way for developers, their apps and services to continually notify and update phone-based programs, for example, with the latest scores from the NCAA tournament.
The goal, Kindel says, is to ensure "We control the quality of the overall user experience.""

The lack of Copy&Paste was unfortunately not discussed in this article. I did however find an article that discussed the lack of Copy and Paste.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/191825/windows_phone_7_copy_and_paste_mia.html

"Microsoft revealed this week at its Mix 10 conference for Microsoft-oriented Web developers that its forthcoming Windows Phone 7 mobile OS will not include a clipboard capability for copy-and-paste operations -- at least not in the first version.
"Windows Phone 7 Series will not initially offer copy-and-paste; instead, we try to solve the most common uses for copy-and-paste via single-tap action," says Casey McGee, a senior marketing manager in Microsoft's Mobile Communications Business group. "For example, people often want to take an address and view it on a map, highlight a term in the browser, and do a search or copy a phone number to make a call. Instead of the user manually doing a copy and paste in these scenarios, we recognize those situations automatically and make them happen with just one touch. In our early testing, people have been pleased with this approach, but we're always listening to feedback and will continue to improve our feature set over time based on what we hear.""



What I see here is Microsoft trying to immitate something Apple did... The problem with this is that nobody liked tihs "feature" on the Iphone either. On the bright side, if you read the above quote there is a ray of sunshine. Number one is that Microsoft implied in their statement that they may add copy and paste in a later version

Number 2 didn't appear in the above quote, because it is said later in the article. Developers will be able to add copy&paste functionality to their apps. This to me sais that if Microsoft doesn't wise up, a developer inevitably will and implement copy&paste in say a web browser, where it's most important to people.

"Casey also notes that developers are free to implement copy-and-paste in their own applications"

In conclusion, the future of the Windows Seven Phone looks fairly bright.

One thing of note, however, is that the Windows Seven Phone will not support flash. From what I understand, flash can severely reduce battery life. To this I say to Microsoft, here's a better option. Include Flash compatibility, simply add an option to disable or enable it, so that people can choose.

The option is better than not having a choice.

Here's a quote from the the article at http://gizmodo.com/5495005/hey-microsoft-dont-fck-up-windows-phone-7

"Dear Microsoft, you did a good job at out-Appling Apple with the Windows Phone 7. At least on paper. But instead of trying to beat them completely, it seems that you want to screw it all with two stupid decisions.

The first one: Eliminate application multitasking. After making fun of Apple's iPhone for not supporting multitasking, you are exactly following Apple's task model... just when it seems that they are bringing multitasking with iPhone OS 4.0."

"And then... then there is copy and paste."

This will suffice for the article at hand. As you may know Windows is releasing a mobile OS platform to compete with the Iphone. My question to Microsoft is... You wouldn't really pull something like this, right? It should be common knowledge by now that everyone likes copy&paste, and everyone hates the lack of ability to multitask.

After all, there are several websites for popular mobile devices that offer a hack for tabbed browsing on normally tab-less browsers. A good example of one of these tabless browsers is the Opera browser for the Nintendo DSi, or Nintendo Wii. Neither have tabs built in, but in both cases there are websites that attempt to hack makeshift tabs for you. In some cases they work very well, such as one site called http://dsitabs.co.cc/

If that doesn't convince you that people love their multi-tasking I don't know what will.

As for copy paste, I don't see why it's a matter of "having it" instead of a matter of "not having it"

After all, shouldn't such a simple, basic functionality of Windows be standard? I dread the idea of typing everything out, on a phone no less, everything I could've copy&pasted in far less time. Don't remove things for no good reason.

This isn't the computer market, this is the phone/mp3 market. And to be honest Apple dominates that market right now. Microsoft needs to take this area of their business seriously, because to be honest it seems obvious to me they couldn't care less about Apple in the computer market.

All in all I think Microsoft has the advantage of better technology here and should make good use of it.

I don't know about the readers, but if the new Windows Phone turns out to be as good it sounds, I'll make an effort to get it.

Microsoft creates a browser choice screen for Europeans

Microsoft put a "Browser Choice Screen" in European versions of Windows. Now, I'm not going to sugar coat this at all. Microsoft chickened out from a fight they had in the bag. See there was, and is, a major controversial problem with the browser choice screen that has already started to cause complaints.

Quote from Link

The ballot screen is also giving more obscure browsers a chance for recognition. In addition to displaying icons for the five major browsers, the screen offers up some real estate to Avant Browser, K-Meleon, Flock, Maxthon, Sleipnir, GreenBrowser, and FlashPeak. However, a few of these lesser-known rivals are unhappy over their placement on the screen and have complained to the EC.

Due to the width of the screen, just IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera are visible at first glance. Only after scrolling to the right can people view the other six browsers in the list. If these more obscure companies have a case, Microsoft may need to tweak its ballot a bit further.

 What you're seeing here is Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari cashing in on their own popularity in order to get an unfair advantage over other browsers. It seems rather hypocritical to me that the same people that complained about Internet Explorer having an unfair advantage are perfectly fine with snuffing out the smaller less popular browsers when they can get away with it.

Incase you weren't aware, there is a scroll bar on the browser choice menu that can show you these smaller less popular browsers. They cannot be seen like the "Popular" browsers by default however.

I'm personally lucky enough to live in the USA where we don't have to deal with this political nonsense

Furthermore, am I the only one noticing that once again Apple is strutting around in their good guy outfit? If you ask me, Microsoft should refuse to put Safari on the list until Apple gives a similar browser choice screen with Internet Explorer on the list. After all, shouldn't they, as big company #2, be following the same fairness rules as everyone else? Or will such questions simply be put off until Apple starts to resemble Microsoft?

Somehow I doubt Apple will be questioned about their own practices for a good long time.

I don't know about the readers, but here in the USA quite easy to install your favorite browser and remove Internet Explorer.