Have used MoWin smartphones. They were okay. They did their jobs and did them well. I’ve really liked a couple.

Got an iPhone (8GB) for Xmas from my wife and would never go back to, in my opinion, just a regular phone. I absolutely love it. It is an insult to call it a ‘phone’. Is it perfect? No. Is MoWin perfect? No… and MoWin is on its 7th major iteration while the iPhone is on its first.

Pick the one that fits your needs. Stop trashing the choices of others to soothe your own fragile egos.

The very presence of the iPhone will make all phones better as manufactures raise their games, carriers realize that great phones (not cheap ones) will drive customers to you, and MS further refines their software.

Critics (most of which haven’t used an iPhone for any appreciable period) should be glad its here and not constantly deriding it. Plus it just seems immature and insecure to do so.

And yet they have totally failed to do that in the cell phone market.

MSFT have just announced that they’ve sold 20 million Windows Mobile devices to date. To put that into perspective, Symbian has sold 190 million devices and Nokia sells over 1 million phones *per day*.

Microsoft is now getting a kicking from Apple, Symbian and Linux in the cell phone world. And its response won’t be out until 2009. I wonder what its rivals will have developed and released by then.

Where’s the dominance? Where’s the success? I don’t think MSFT should be proud of 4th place.

Probably not. Apple will respond in kind with a thingy called a lawsuit or something. For the flicking and gestures.

Possibly first demonstration of the possibilites of multi-touch tech… http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/

Apple’s use of touch screens and gesture recognition; 1993 with the Newton
Their first use of multi-touch tech (albeit simple); 2004 trackpad in their laptops

So if MS has been developing something like this, why criticize the iPhone for not having a keyboard?

You complain about Apple not being the first touch-screen phone maker, but who ever used the technology like Apple did? Nobody! Now MS is using it like Apple.

Microsoft innovates enough to create markets which drive standards which their developer community adopts and build around- which leads to MSFT dominance and success. Wash, rinse, repeat…

If others are creating their own standards (for example around touch screens), they abstract the valuable aspects of the technology and integrate them into their offerings. If there is a problem, they’ll license or fight it out in court if necessary (given the breadth of their own patent library, this usually works). The point is, the emergent technology will be integrated into the MS offering.

Techcrunch community users should rejoice at this strategy. Overall, Microsoft is moving the screwed up communications industry forward (to their benefit to be sure), but they are not sitting still around like so much of the mobile software and hardware operators do. Ultimately, this can only create more benefit for future development and a better offering for users. The goal is simple- move mobile development from the communications sector to the computing sector. If anyone thinks that it won’t take a Company as powerful as MSFT to do that…they are crazy.

Lastly, Microsoft has much prior history (to iPhone) with gesturing touch screens- going back to their pen based computing days in 1992. To treat Apple developers as the sole innovator around this technology seems misplaced to me.

iphone isn’t real multitouch. 2 points of contact only.
winmo has had touch screen for ages… Devices with full face touch screens *really* can’t look that different.

Lets not forget LG actually did it before apple.

lets also not forget apple doesn’t give a crap because they’ll still sell millions more iphones anyway.

The devices probably won’t even be aimed at the same people.

Incidentally, while microsofts surface platform was only done in may or so 2007 - there was very similar devices knocked together by a whole stack of people… I remember seeing one a few years ago in my last year of highschool.

Everyone steals from everyone else in the consumer electronics industry.
It’s all about adapting to the accepted standard. Thats where the money really is. Original research is expensive and doesn’t always pay off… Being 2nd to market with an agressive price point and enough clout in terms of brand gets you by most of the time.

Paul Shearer
http://windows2008.informedcio.com

Such technologies take years to develop. There are several projects around multi-touch screens for decades. And Apple came only late in the battle, though, I must admit, that the iPhone is certainly one of the first consumer implementation, with an uncontested success.

Just have a look at this quick history of the various projects related to multi-touch screens:
http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

In a times when bloggers pretend to be better journalists, it’s so funny to see some people making the same mistakes and publish information without having verified their sources or doing a sanity check. Too bad.

With kind regards,

–
Christophe Lauer
(Oh yes, I do work for Microsoft France, BTW)

And please Microsoft, No At&T

Note that neither Xbox was the first game console, nor Zune the first portable media plater, but MSFT has proven that it can add a great deal of value (to the consumer’s experience as well as OEMs’ pockets) by spotting trends, then following the ones that make business sense.

At the end, this benefits the consumers.

Do you expect Microsoft to sit there and let there mobile OS just stagnate for the sake of not being perceiveda s copy cats?

Geez think about what your saying, it’s not a bad thing what there doing!

Microsoft have innovated in so many other areas, they can’t always be first to market at everything. In time they will create features on the mobile that will be innovative and first to market, then Apple will be forced to copy there IP.

Get over it!

Also, lets see if MS gets to developing Multi-touch screens. That was a Apple first, so MS would like to ’second’ it. LOL.