Microsoft should abandon or entirely reboot its mobile strategy because its latest product is barely as good as the iPhone from 2007 on the present developer offer

The as-yet unreleased Windows Phone 7 is a “waste of time and money”, a “disaster” that Microsoft should kill as soon as possible. So says Galen Gruman of Infoworld, who has watched an in-depth demonstration of the new phone software at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partners Conference which has been going on all week at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Windows Phone uses a “contact-centric” approach, where rather than doing “tasks” (in the iPhone app way), you are presented generally with contacts, and informed when someone has done something (updated their Facebook/Twitter feed, called you, etc). My personal first impression of the screenshots was “that’s really not going to scale to the point where you have 300 people in your contacts book and 20 Facebook friends and 50 emails and 100 people you follow on Twitter and 30 apps”, but I thought that was just me not following the thinking behind it.

But it looks like I may have been right.

Gruman started the year being impressed with early demos of Windows Phone 7 – but that’s worn off in a big way.

“Announced to much bravado in February as the platform that would breathe life into Microsoft’s mobile ambitions, Windows Phone 7 looked based on very early previews as if it might bring something new and exciting to the table. Back then, I noted that I was impressed by what I saw — with the caveat “so far.”

“No caveats now: Windows Phone 7 is a waste of time and money. It’s a platform that no carrier, device maker, developer, or user should bother with. Microsoft should kill it before it ships and admit that it’s out of the mobile game for good. It is supposed to ship around Christmas 2010, but anyone who gets one will prefer a lump of coal. I really mean that.”

Ouch. What’s happened, Galen?

“The early demos were intriguing due to the use of the card metaphor to organize apps and information, providing a possible fluidity among apps and information that would let users swim through their business and social activities. And the distinct UI — though based on the unsuccessful Zune media player — looked as if it would stand out from the crowd of mobile devices that have largely copied the iPhone UI, such as Google’s Android, RIM’s touch-oriented BlackBerry Storm, and Palm’s WebOS.”

Hmm.

“But that was just the lipstick. Now, in Microsoft’s in-depth demo this week at the Mobile Beat conference, there’s no mistaking the big pig behind the gloss. Seeing the UI in action across several tasks, not just in a highly controlled presentation, shows how awkward and unsophisticated it is — I had the same feeling you get when you got a movie based on a great trailer, only to discover that all the good stuff was in the trailer and the rest of the movie was a mess. A pig, in fact.”

There’s plenty more; it’s worth reading in depth. Gruman says that as well as resting on old technology, Windows Phone 7 is simply outdated:

“The bottom line is this: Windows Phone 7 is a pale imitation of the 2007-era iPhone. It’s as if Microsoft decided in summer 2007 to copy the iPhone and has shut its developers in a bunker ever since, so they don’t realize that several years have passed, that the iPhone has advanced, and that competitors such as Google Android and Palm WebOS have also pushed the needle forward. Microsoft is stuck in 2007, with a smartphone OS whose feature checklist might match that era’s iPhone but whose fit and finish would look like a Pinto next to a Maserati.”

Gruman went along to a presentation at WPC (which has been generally described as “lacklustre” – and certainly seems to have been much smaller than in previous years by all accounts) and was worried by what seemed like poor responses to the handful of outside developers who had come along.

Arguably, WPC is not the place where you’re going to find the hottest WP7 developers; it’s more about geeing up the people who will resell Microsoft products. But the fact that only a few months short of the grand launch of WP7 it can’t wow even developers for the platform sounds bad. Gruman’s description of the presentation makes it sound like one of those uncomfortable events where the tumbleweed was always at risk of rolling past.

And as for the “locked in a bunker since 2007″ jibe – don’t forget the Kin, which seems to have been the victim of political infighting at Microsoft, as the incoming developer team from Danger (which Microsoft bought to produce the Kin) found themselves mired in layers of management that effectively brought them to a dead stop. Read the full horror of it at the Mini-Microsoft blog (by a disaffected Microsoft manager, but the comments are from ex-Danger staff and others).

Back to Gruman, who points to the flaws with the “tiles” method:

“… the big tiles quickly eat up screen real estate (about four fit), so you don’t get the compact access to apps that all the other major mobile operating systems provide. I bet this will depress app sales for those poor souls unlucky enough to get seduced by the Microsoft brand or the inevitable discounts at the cellular stores as the carriers try to dump these devices in January 2011 for $25 (shades of the unlamented Kin).

“Plus, Microsoft has done its usual trick of gumming up the UI, even though this one is relatively simple. There are two ways to navigate through tiles: in panorama mode and in pivot mode. In both cases, the tile continues to the right, and you swipe to see more. In panorama mode, cut-off text on the right indicates there’s more (at Mobile Beat, a developer asked if users knew what that cut-off text was for, and the Microsoft rep essentially admitted they didn’t get it was a way to say “more”). In pivot mode, each tile is self-contained, and there is an icon to indicate there is more. It’s a subtle difference: Using a panorama basically means the tile continues because it won’t fit on screen, while using a pivot means you have a series of what are essentially pages. I bet developers and users will get confused very fast.

“Visions of Vista’s litter of control panel dialog boxes, Microsoft Bob, the Office ribbon, Clippy, and Windows 3 flew through my head — not that Windows Phone 7 looks like any of these; it just shares the same flaw of being obtuse.”

And that’s only for starters. Other complaints: the browser, IE7 with a bit of IE8, doesn’t support HTML5; there’s no multitasking except for Microsoft’s own apps (Android and, now, the iPhone both support cooperative multitasking by all apps); there doesn’t seem to be interapplication communication for third-party apps; there’s no copy-and-paste (emphasis added) – even though Apple was roundly and rightly criticised for not introducing it until summer 2009, and Windows Mobile 6.1 did have it.

Gruman says there’s going to be no come-from-behind take-over-the-world for Microsoft if this doesn’t succeed: RIM (prepping BlackBerry 6), Android, Apple and Nokia will all eat its lunch and dance on its grave.

At this point, people usually begin an ad-hominem, to ask whether Gruman is biased or (sigh) in the pay of company X or Y. Judge for yourself from the Infoworld author bio and item list.

Meanwhile, if anyone else has had a hands-on with Windows Phone 7 – via the developer kit or other methods – we’d love to hear about it. Good? Bad? Indifferent? What’s it really like?

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(Source The Guardian)

Bogus headlines about phones giving you cancer are naff. If we’re going to panic let’s do it well, and keep disbelief suspended

Mobile phones give you brain cancer, and a bacon sandwich a day puts up heart disease by a half. It makes the choice pretty simple: bacon is tastier than ceaseless phone chat, and myocardial infarction is a lot quicker than a brain tumour. That said, it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that you’ve eaten a bacon sandwich while on the phone – in which case it’s not a choice but a double whammy.

Both of these appeared as headlines in the Daily Mail: on the mobiles and brain cancer risk, its report was a marked contrast to those of the broadsheets, who agreed that the study on which the story was based had found no statistically significant raised risk. The author of the study, Professor Anthony Swerdlow of the Institute of Cancer Research, clarified the findings for me (as he had already, in a press conference – the misreporting here isn’t accidental): there were 10 usage groups, ranging from very low to very high. In the very highest group – those reporting using their phone for 12 or more hours a day – there was a raised chance of both glioma and meningioma.

However, that level of use is in itself improbable, and you have to take into account the possibility that, since this sample is of people with brain tumours, they were confused or misremembering. (“They’d have to have been millionaires,” Swerdlow commented, in passing; I personally think their wealth of time is more remarkable.)

Furthermore, there is a dose response missing: “Real causes tend to give progressively larger risks with larger doses. Biases sometimes don’t, because the most extreme values can be errors,” Swerdlow said, adding: “The study isn’t useless or pointless but it needs careful interpretation.”

Finally, biological literature can find no mechanism by which radio waves can cause cancer at all. Mobile phones don’t disrupt DNA, which is the way ionising radiation causes cancer – that much was already well known. This makes me wonder whether the study was worth doing at all, but Swerdlow is very clear on this: “There is public concern, and it’s part of the function of scientists to answer the questions that people are concerned about.”

My view is that cancers are so diffuse, now – in cause, in treatment, in aggressiveness, in fatality, in the people they attack – that we’re not really talking about a disease at all, we’re using it as an umbrella term for death. The two elemental truths are that nobody wants to be ill, and yet nobody wants to live forever. This presents a chasm of realistic expectation: how do you eradicate disease while preserving mortality? What, exactly, do you want to die in your sleep of? There is also the ticklish conflict between what you want for yourself today and tomorrow, and what you imagine you’ll want when you’re 80. If we were to talk openly about death, the onus would be on everybody to charge on to this fraught, conflicted territory; if we only talk about cancer, we can leave it to doctors.

That doesn’t, however, tell the whole story about our love affair with scare stories. To move on to bacon, the Harvard School of Public Health has just produced a study showing the risk of heart disease goes up by 42% with every two-ounce (about 56g) serving of processed meat. It sounds extraordinarily high, but on closer inspection isn’t. Compare it to smoking, which raises the risk of cancer by 20 times, that is, 2,000%. A 42% rise is small, in epidemiological terms, and could have been thrown up by a bias (maybe angry men eat more bacon than placid women?). But it would be an extraordinary bias that could produce a 2,000% increase.

The newspaper, in reporting this story (in fairness, it was, again, only the Daily Mail), takes the role of the Friend Who Exaggerates. They expect you to enjoy the drama of their tale, adjusting it down to reality afterwards.

And they’re right, to a point. Medical melodrama in the media is emphatically not taken as a guide. Well, smoking has diminished, by dint of the fact that it is manifestly dangerous and there aren’t many places you can do it. But drinking, eating meat, not doing enough exercise – all the core modules of carcinogenic (or, generally, illness generating) behaviour steadily rise. We look at scare stories not as a blueprint for a better life, but for thrill-tainment; we’re looking for the fright elements of the horror genre; the masochistic guilt of the religious experience; and enough cod statistics to feel, fleetingly, as if we’re being educated.

My beef with the Mail and its ill-explained stats and totally bogus headlines, is not about the spread of the panic itself, which serves a cultural purpose and is enjoyable, but that it doesn’t do it very well.

When the author of a study says there is most likely no connection between mobile phone use and brain cancer, the headline to print is not “more muddle over mobiles as study suggests raised brain cancer risk”. Poor statistical analysis is like bad CGI: it breaks the spell, drags you back to a world where robots don’t exist and the causes of cancer are quite incremental and quotidian. Health journalism (and it’s not just the Mail) needs more scientific credibility, even to function as entertainment.

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(Source The Guardian)

Who are you? And where’s our money?

A confused Orange disconnected a customer after he cancelled his brother’s account, and then insisted he pay for the suspended line until he produced ID to get reconnected.…

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(Source The Register)

The Conservative’s
Technology
Manifesto was launched yesterday with several laudable aims, however its
ambitions seem confused.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

Document sharing website Scribd to challenge Apple and Amazon in the mobile market

Document sharing website Scribd is making a more direct challenge to Amazon and Apple by launching a mobile service that it hopes will make it easier for millions of people to read on the go.

The move could put the well-regarded startup – described as “YouTube for documents” – into more direct competition with larger rivals such as Amazon and Apple, which is set to launch the iPad and its iBooks application next month.

Scribd already offers more than 10m documents online, including books from major publishers such as Random House and Simon & Schuster, but from today will also begin offering users the chance to read their files on any smartphone or ebook reader.

A simple system to send files to their device – regardless of what it is – may help erase complexity and give people easy access to much more content, said Trip Adler, Scribd’s co-founder and chief executive.

“Right now people are confused about which e-reader to buy, they’re confused about how to get content onto their devices,” he told the Guardian. “This solves all of that by putting all these devices so you can read any content on Scribd on your device.”

At the moment, most ebook readers acquire new titles through applications specifically built by the makers of their gadget – such as Amazon’s Kindle book catalogue. Adler suggested that providing a broad range of material across all devices was largely uncharted territory, but that it should boost the popularity of ebooks and downloads of other types of documents.

“This should help increase sales, because if people can read things they buy on the web on their device, they are more likely to buy it,” he said.

Amazon already offers access to its catalogue of books through the Kindle, as well as an iPhone application, but Scribd’s 50 million users will also be able to download other documents shared through its site – including how-to guides, research papers and self-published books.

The move is part of a wider mobile strategy that the company says will help it tap into the huge mobile devices market. Over the next month, it plans to launch a range of applications for the Kindle, iPad, iPhone and Android handsets, as well as a number of other platforms.

It is also launching developer tools that will enable programmers to create their own applications to search and link to any of the documents held in Scribd’s archive.

“There are maybe a million ebook readers out there, but there are billions of smartphone users,” Adler said.

The launch comes on the heels of a similar effort by Kobo Books, an American ebook retailer which earlier this week unveiled its own system aimed specifically at the UK market.

Kobo has agreements in place with most major publishers – including Bloomsbury, Penguin and Faber & Faber – and says it will also offer many titles for free.

But while the ebook industry has plenty of momentum, it has also been dogged by controversy.

Some publishers have said they will delay ebook releases to protect hardback sales, and Macmillan recently found itself in a feud with Amazon over the price of digital texts.

The outlook for sales, meanwhile, remains unclear. High street retailer Waterstone’s, which has its own ebook store, said that just 80,000 titles were sold in the run-up to Christmas and Amazon is still silent on Kindle ebook sales despite continuing to boast that they now make up a significant part of its business.

Adler said that platform-agnostic selling was a significant step forward that would not only encourage more people to buy ebooks, but could also convince publishers to sell unprotected files, rather than encumber their products with anti-piracy locks.

Scribd has raised almost $14m from investors since being founded in 2007, with backers including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and former PayPal executive David Sacks.

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(Source The Guardian)

Apple’s decision to remove thousands of adult-themed apps over the weekend has left developers confused and angry.

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(Source BBC Technology)

• After a series of struggles, Nokia says it’s going to cut the number of smartphone models it makes in half. Why? Because of “unnecessary differentiation” that’s leading companies like Apple and Research in Motion to give it a run for its money. It’s hard to tell exactly whether this will be good news for customers – so let us know: are you confused by the number of different Nokias out there? Will fewer models make a difference to you?

• As if that wasn’t enough, Google set the cat among the pigeons yesterday by announcing the launch of its own DNS (Domain Name System). That basically means it is offering to take charge of the process of connecting a website’s name (like guardian.co.uk) with its IP address (which reads 77.91.249.30) – acting like a telephone directory for the web. Everyone uses DNS and your ISP usually does it for you – but Google suggests that it can do it be faster and with greater stability thanks to its immense resources. It’s a very technical move, but one that places Google at yet another point in the stack (possibly ahead of integration with the forthcoming Chrome operating system) and has already drawn some interesting comment from competitors such as OpenDNS.

• And to lead you into the weekend, how about some beautiful photography? I’ve always been a fan of the World Press Photo awards, which consistently deliver moving and powerful images. This year’s winners are online now, and worth a look. Meanwhile, on a more informal note, a new photographic story magazine website has launched called Pictory. The idea is to showcase sequences of user-submitted photos and stories along a given theme. It’s from Laura Brunow Miner, former editor of the similarish JPG magazine, and the first collaborative essay is entitled Overseas and Overwhelmed.

You can follow our links and commentary each day through Twitter (@guardiantech, or our personal accounts) or by watching our Delicious feed.

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(Source The Guardian)

Many of us are avoiding buying a new mobile phone because of the complexity of setting it up, according to new research.

Almost two-thirds of those asked in a new poll admitted that they found moving over to a new handset as frustrating as changing to a new bank account.

And 78% of respondents in the survey by mobile management firm Mformation said they would be more likely to upgrade their phones if the set-up were easier.

Furthermore, users are being scared off using mobile services and applications by their complexity – 61% admitting they have stopped using certain functions because of their difficulty.

Almost half (46%) of those asked said that mobile email did not work as they expected it to when they switched on their phone; 40% complained about the mobile internet; and 30% weren’t happy with the ease of using instant messaging.

“Operators and device manufacturers need to remove barriers to service uptake and unlock the true power of advanced mobile technology,” said Matthew Bancroft, Vice President, Mformation.

“The message from consumers is that phone setup is simply too complex. Clearly, this needs to be addressed. ‘Up and running straight out-of-the-box’ means exactly that, and our research shows that improving this aspect of the mobile phone purchasing experience will help to improve profitability for many players in our industry.”

Most of the 4,000 people in the UK and US asked in the Coleman Parkes research felt that 15 minutes was the maximum time it should take to set up a new mobile phone.

However, most are spending almost an hour to get their new handset up and running, meaning many hang on to their old phone for longer before upgrading.

Source Metro