A year of Windows Phone
I have been using Windows Phone for well over a year now both for personal use and business use and have been impressed by what it has on offer from an ever-improving operating system, a very nice user experience to a maturing phone ecosystem. There has already been much said of Windows Phone and I would say that most of its been positive. Much to my surprise though, market share has dropped to 1.5% compared to 2.5% last year. Putting that stat to one side for now, 2011 has been quite significant for Windows Phone as it’s seen a major update to the software, thousands of apps being published, a variety of newer handsets, huge support for developers/designers and a considerable partnership with Nokia, all of which has put it in a good position to push on in 2012 and gain an increase in market share.
Here are some of my highlights of Windows Phone:
User Interface
I just love the new UI in Windows Phone! The Phone team at Microsoft introduced a completely redesigned UI called Metro. Metro has been given a big thumbs up by the creative and user experience community through its use of simple, clean, tiled interface that does a good job of presenting lots of dynamic real-time content consistently on mobile/tablet devices, desktop LCD’s or television screens.
Metro is now being used as the UI on Microsoft’s highly anticipated new operating system Windows 8 and is already on its way to xBox. The picture below from winrumors.com shows Metro UI on Windows 8, Windows Phone and xBox Live.
Let’s get Social
A major new functionality, introduced by the mango software update, is the social network integration. This bring in social integration capabilities with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and xBox Live.
I absolutely love this feature as my phone contacts list now has the likes of Charlie Sheen, Robin Van Persie, Richard Branson alongside my LBi colleagues and my mum ![]()
Apps and Marketplace
Let’s face it, a decent smartphone isn’t really decent unless it has the ability to discover, find and download applications…. and lots of them! There are now over 45,000 apps on the Windows Phone ‘app store’ otherwise known as Marketplace.
With the recent Mango update as mentioned earlier, the IE mobile browser got upgraded and now supports HTML5. That means Windows Phone now joins the other major phone players in the market for running websites that have been developed in HTML5.
Developers, Developers, Developers
The thousands of apps available to download across Apple App Store, Windows Phone Marketplace, Android Market, wouldn’t be possible without skilling up mobile application developers. Over the last 18 months Microsoft has made quite a large investment in the developer community by providing dev tools, learning kits, training and running developer courses and events globally.
Earlier this year, LBi was selected as the exclusive London digital agency partner to host the London Windows Phone Camps at our Truman Brewery offices. These dev camps have been very successful with the last camp reaching record numbers.
The Nokia partnership
2011 has seen a partnership between Microsoft and Nokia and the emergence of new Nokia smartphones running Windows Phone operating system. This was a very good move by both companies and exactly what they needed to compete with Google and Apple. The recent London launch of the Nokia Lumia phone shows just how serious Nokia are of the partnership and importance of gaining a market share in the smartphone race.
Well there you go, some of my highlights of Windows Phone in 2011. Windows Phone must be doing something right because just the other day I talked about some of the above with mates who are big time iPhone and Android fans and even they were impressed saying how Windows Phone had really caught up with the competition.
I think so too.
Thanks for reading and have an amazing 2012!
Riaz (@TheRealRiaz)
Tags: Android, apple, Google, iPhone, Metro, Microsoft, mobile, Nokia, Technology, UI, Windows, Windows 8, Windows Phone, xbox






