Are you really trying to increase market share?

Microsoft have three different kinds of mobile phone operating system.

  • The 6.x series, which is really only usable with a stylus, and is old, out of date, and generally a pain to use.
  • The 7.x series, which is, fundamentally a step above the 6.x series, with a more modern UI. It is slick and elegant, but it is based on the kernel from the 6.x series, and as such is a little bit on the old side.
  • Now there is the 8.x series, which runs the proper windows kernel under the hood, but just with a mobile phone UI on top. It looks very similar to the 7.x series, but the hardware is significantly different; so much so that there is no way to upgrade a phone from the 7.x series to the 8.x series — you will have to buy a new phone to get the features of the new OS.

This new series of phones (the 7/8 series) is a huge step forward for Microsoft. There is a consistent UI, there is a defined design language. You have an App Store for buying all those must have applications; all in all everything you need for a modern phone.

Then there’s the desktop software. For 7, you have the Zune software. This is needed if you want to copy music or movies from your computer to your phone, or transfer photos back from the phone to your desktop.
I have no experience with the windows phone app for an 8 phone, as I haven’t had the opportunity to buy one of these new phones yet. I’m sure it’s an elegant piece of software that interacts well with the phone, allowing you to transfer media to and from. The device; after all, that’s what it’s supposed to do.
The problem is that this is the only way to interact with these phones and your desktop. There is no way to get anything from the phone by a direct connection without installing the software. Microsoft have gone directly to the same model as Apple with regards to device management, except less so — the Apple solution allows you to synchronise your email settings and contact information explicitly, while the Microsoft solution does not. Don’t get me wrong, a little management is a good thing when it comes to these devices which are significantly more complicated than older devices, but sometimes you just want to pull a picture from the phone and it just doesn’t happen.

If you plug an android phone into a computer up pops a hard drive icon that you can use to copy files from the device, or copy files to the device. It may be as raw as you get, but at least you can drag your music to the device and it just works. There are several third party programs that will allow you to manage the content on the device, so if you don’t like it then you can use one of the DoubleTwists, etc.

Transferring pictures from the phone provides a wide variety of social services, but gone is the simple ‘send via Bluetooth’ (again with the media management thing). Have you ever tried to print a picture from a photo kiosk on a Windows phone? It’s as difficult as with an iPhone — you just don’t bother. Lots of lovely images on the web, and not an actual photo to be seen 🙁