Microsoft reveals early Windows Phone 7 ideas

Love it or loathe it, there’s no denying that the Windows Phone 7 user interface is at least a radical attempt by Microsoft to forge a bold new path for its smartphone operating system.

As you might expect though, the current ‘Metro’ UI wasn’t the only idea that Microsoft came up with and, perhaps in an attempt to eradicate those awful ‘ Windows Mobile 7’ (as it was back then) screenshots of late 2009 from our memory, it has released a pile of other designs from the Windows Phone 7 drawing board.

The images come from a Microsoft presentation at MIX10 and all follow the same minimalist approach as Metro — it’s just the colour schemes and font sizes that seem to vary. Some are clearly more successful than others, however…

To be fair, Microsoft does also acknowledge those leaked ‘Windows Mobile 7’ screenshots in the presentation too, so it looks like they were an accurate depiction once what it was considering to be the look and feel of its next generation smartphone OS.

Fortunately, there seems to have been an outbreak of common sense at Microsoft at some point and those designs were ditched. How successful the Metro UI Microsoft finally settled on will be won’t be known until smartphones using it go on sale — and that won’t be until the end of this year.

[ I Started Something via PocketNow]