Microsoft's phones: A call too late

Ever seen a Microsoft Zune HD? It’s a lovely little device for watching movies, listening to music and playing games. Slim, sleek, sophisticated — and irrelevant. That’s because the Zune HD was released two years after the debut of Apple’s iPod Touch. By the time it joined the battle, the war was already lost.

In technology, being late can be as disastrous as being wrong. And that’s the battle Microsoft is now fighting with the release of Windows Phone 7, its new smartphone operating system. The good news is that the software is generally a winner: Fun, easy to use and not just another iPhone wannabe. The bad news is that the good news may not matter.

As devastating as the iPhone’s arrival proved, Microsoft’s true mortal threat comes from Google’s Android software, which in little more than a year has skyrocketed. Google says it is now activating more than 200,000 new Android devices a day. While Google gives its software to manufacturers, Microsoft charges for its.

CEO Steve Ballmer’s previous attempts to stem the Android-iPhone tide resulted in embarrassment upon embarrassment, including a roundly panned update of Microsoft’s previous mobile operating system in 2009 and, earlier this year, the dismal failure of its Kin line, two phones built around social networking that were killed off less than two months after they were introduced.

In other words, the stakes could hardly be higher. And because of that, Microsoft – which is exerting a great deal of control over manufacturers in terms of the look and feel of the new Windows Phone 7 handsets – deserves a lot of credit for being willing to do a few things that go against the prevailing smartphone norm.

‘Live tiles’
The difference is apparent from the moment you power up a Windows Phone. Instead of screen after screen of application icons, as with the iPhone and Android phones, you’re presented with a set of colourful rectangles Microsoft calls ‘live tiles’. Some of these provide information and summon basic functions, like the phone tile that tells you how many calls you’ve missed and brings up the dial pad; some are links to programs, such as a mobile version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Browser; and some are entry points for what Windows Phone 7 calls ‘hubs’.

To the extent that Windows Phone 7 has a Big Idea, hubs is it. These are collections of programs, information and functions organised around a single theme. There are six of them: People, Pictures, Music and Video, Marketplace, Microsoft Office and Games. Microsoft has a good idea here, but it has to do much more to make its phones friendlier to the things I want to use on it, not what it and its partners want me to use.

That, in fact, is my biggest complaint about Windows Phone 7: Too much about it seems dictated by business considerations rather than user experience. For instance, the two AT&T phones I tested – the HTC Surround and the Samsung Focus – both included a fat first-screen tile touting AT&T’s U-verse television service. Office, which includes limited-function productivity software, seems to be a hub because, well, Microsoft owns Microsoft Office.

Playing catch-up
Because Windows Phone 7 is, essentially, an entirely new smartphone platform, it will take a while before we have any sense of whether and how quickly third-party developers write apps for it (the new Marketplace hub is still in the process of being populated.) Certainly Microsoft, with its deep pockets, will do all it can to provide inducements, but it’s safe to say that it will lag far behind the iPhone, Android devices and even Research In Motion’s BlackBerry for a long time to come.

Similarly, Microsoft has a lot of catching up to do in terms of basic functionality. Among other things, Windows Phone 7 doesn’t yet offer a visual listing of voicemail messages, as Android phones and iPhones do, nor does is it equipped to share its Internet connection with other devices.

(Rich Jaroslovsky is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)