Windows Mobile 7 Delay, after the dust has settled

We have spoken on the last podcast about the disappointment that we felt when we heard the news that Windows Mobile 7 would be delayed until the second half of next year and now after giving it some thought over the last few days maybe it is not such a bad thing that they are delaying it, as long as it is for the right reasons. The way I see it is there could be two reasons for the delay and let us consider what each of these reasons could be.

The first reason is that they have not given it enough resources and are concentrating instead on the upcoming Windows 7 OS for the PC. All their available man power is working hard on that and again Windows Mobile will be pushed to one side and left till late in the day. They will then release another half baked update which will not give us what we need and again we will all be beta testers for another 12 months once it is released and Windows Mobile will fail badly and then disappear forever.

The second reason is the most appealing. Microsoft is taking a step back and re-designing Windows Mobile from the ground up. It is going to be the OS we all want to use, it is going to have support for capacitive screens and a screen capable of switching to the usual stylus friendly input. This would give you both finger friendly UI navigation and the ability to accurately draw on the screen, the best of both worlds. On top of that we will have great gesture features and hopefully multi-touch.

Microsoft will also deliver a UI geared around business and pleasure, not one or the other, great office applications matched with excellent music and video play back solutions, application and music stores that are easily integrated into the Windows Mobile ecosystem. If they manage to release something like this then they may just be onto a winner. Most importantly please test it out before releasing it, you have the time to do that now, make a soft reset a thing of the past, manage memory better without the need for task managers and clumsy add on’s that we don’t want to use to make the OS stable. Give us a back up system where we can restore all our settings easily after a firmware update or hard reset, just make things easy.

If Microsoft can deliver the ease of use matched with it’s already advanced feature set we could well see a mobile OS that can be streets ahead of what we are seeing now from their competitors, Microsoft it’s over to you, you have till the last half of 2009 to get this right, give it your full attention and make us proud of being a Windows Mobile user again.