The Press Responds to Microsofts New Windows Phones Announcement

Well, the press (generically) are responding quite rapidly to Microsoft's recent announcement of New Windows Phones and a new version of their Windows Mobile OS.

The majority of the press articles I've read agree with my personal opinion: Windows Mobile is the ugly stepsister of all the smartphone OSs! It's clunky, slow, resource intensive, and ugly. Microsoft is still in the same position they were in when they entered the smartphone race: way at the back of the pack, busy trying to play catch-up with both their software (OS and apps) and hardware. While Palm spent many years putting Windows Mobile (in all it's various names and incarnations) to shame, currently it's the iPhone that's taken on that position. This latest announcement is just another "look, see what we have (copied)" gambit by Microsoft.

One of the more interesting responses is in an article entitled "Microsoft still has no iPhone answer" on Digital Noise - a blog about music and technology by Matt Rosoff for cnet news.

In part Matt says:

Most of Microsoft's announcements Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona were leaked weeks ago, so there weren't any big surprises.

• There's a new mobile OS, Windows Mobile 6.5, that's supposed to be friendlier than the notoriously clunky earlier versions.
  
• There's a set of cloud-based services for synchronizing data like contacts and photos.
  
• There's a marketplace for Windows Mobile apps.

Assuming that any of this makes you want to run out and buy a Windows Mobile phone, too bad. None of it's available until late this year.

I found Matt's article quite interesting, so click through and read the whole thing.