The Giant vs. The Giants
On the day that Symbian announces Samsung has licenced it's OS, Microsoft launches it's smartphone in the U.K. From Gizmodo:
Smartphone Debuts today in the UK
The SPV Smartphone from Orange, the first phone to run Microsoft's new Smartphone OS, comes out today. Will be in stores later this month. AT&T Wireless will offer Smartphones in the US by the middle of next year. Cingular and Verizon are signed up to offer service soon after. Watch the live webcast from London.
You can see the launch presentation here. It's well over an hour long... I haven't watched it all yet.
Mobile, in my mind, is still the next high-tech battleground. WiFi or Telcom, wireless is where the growth is. It's going to be very interesting to watch... The principal five mobile phone makers in the world vs. Microsoft. You know what? As much as I hate to say it, I bet on MS... ugh.
-Russ
Later... News.com has a bit of info on the new phone too. It's called an SPV... Microsoft can't get one of the big guys to make their phones, so they've got "Taiwan-based High Tech Computer (HTC), the contract manufacturer for Hewlett-Packard's original iPaq" to make it... Yowza.
My prediction is that MS is going to blanket the earth with these phones at cut-rate prices. They're going to skip right over the manufacturers and cut deals directly with the telecoms and lay waste to their competitors. The demos I saw are better than anything else I've seen so far. Responding to emails via your phone by recording a message and sending it back? That's a pretty neat feature. The return message arrives in your mailbox as a .wmv (what else) attachment... Other cool stuff.
Like I've said before, Manywhere was created from my excitement over the wireless space. News like this gets me all jazzed again. I might have to break out my Symbian books and Series60 SDK again and join the rebel hoards against the onslaught of the $40 Billion Monopolist.
-r