Windows Phone 7 Goes Gold

Windows Phone 7 has “gone gold”. The term comes from the old, CD-ROM, days when software manufacturers would send a "gold” master CD to the duplication plant. In the case of Windows Phone it means that the phone manufacturers have been given the final version of the product to put into their handsets.

I’ve been using Windows Phone 7 for a while now and I love it. Going back to the iphone turns out to be hard work. Windows Phone is one of those clever interfaces that grows on you. The more you use it the more of these little touches that you notice, like the way that icons rotate when you change the screen orientation. And moving between programs using the back button is really easy. Microsoft have a really big mountain to climb with this new platform. But they have also made something rather special. With a bit of luck the phones themselves should not be long coming as well.

The whole Windows Phone team deserves immense respect for what they have achieved in such a short time. Kudos folks.

Comments

[Andrew]

They definitely do have a mountain to climb. Given how deep their Silverlight & .NET software stack is I shall be impressed if they can match the smoothness and battery life of the iPhone. Every CPU cycle spent jittering or traversing layers of abstraction burns power and takes away from the user experience. Compare this to the iPhone where user code pretty much runs directly against the bare metal.

I have no doubt that Windows Phone 7 devices will have more features and an easier programming environment but whether that translates to a better experience for the end consumer remains to be seen.

[Leo]

sounds cool, gonna try to create some apps for phone 7. Should be fun...