Saw Windows Phone 7 in the Flesh

These past two days I’ve been in Chengdu for Microsoft’s embedded师资研讨会. Met old friends Li Bei, Ma Ning, and Lu Lie. Li Bei and Ma Ning already have WP7 devices. One good thing about WP7: it forces you to practice English. They text me in English — no Chinese input method, ha.

Saw the HTC Trophy in person. Metro UI looks better on a real device than on the emulator. On the emulator, those color blocks look underwhelming, but on the actual phone they’re quite nice. Played with it a bit. Not bad. Unfortunately, it came out 3 years too late. If it had launched alongside Android, it might have been competitive. Now? The dishes are cold.

These days I’ve also learned some WP7 development. The Zune influence is obvious. Architecture-wise, purely my personal opinion, it can’t compare to Android. Although they’ve wrapped and modified CE, they’ve used too much of CE’s internals. The wrapping isn’t as thorough as Android’s transformation of Linux. C# development is simple, sure, but many things that were straightforward with native code are now impossible. Backward compatibility with WM6 is also a致命 problem. Of course, these can improve over time. The question is: how much market is left for MS to capture?