A few more facts about Windows Phone

We posted a quick update to The Inquirer's scoop about the imminent Windows Mobile name change on Saturday, but here's a bit more information about Microsoft's plans for the upcoming versions of its handheld operating system.

First though, here's a clarification about the name "Windows Phone". Despite "Windows Mobile is no longer" [sic] being clearly uttered by the person doing the Windows Phone demo at the start of The Inquirer's video, Microsoft apparently has no plans to dump the "Windows Mobile" name.

A post over at Brighthand.com quotes Windows Mobile Group Product Manager, Scott D. Rockfield, who says:

We introduced the term "Windows phone" to the industry at Mobile World Congress as a way to make it easy for consumers to identify the set of phones with Windows software and services on them. However, we will still use the term "Windows Mobile" to identify the operating system releases, but ultimately, we want customers to be able to go into a retail store and say, "I want a Windows phone!"

Ignoring the fact that customers have been able to ask for just that for a number of years without any confusion, it seems that "Windows Phone" appears to be nothing more than a branding exercise for handsets running Windows Mobile rather than any attempt to scrub "Windows Mobile" from the consumer's minds. In other words, it's much the same idea as the "Professional" and "Standard" names that currently apply to Windows Mobile smartphones with and without (respectively) touch-screens.

Microsoft has no plans to refer to a version number with Windows Phone though, and instead intends to simply differentiate handsets by referring to those with the latest version of the operating system as "premium". Then, when a new version of the OS is released, the previous version will be demoted to mere "value" status. Since Microsoft doesn't make Windows Mobile updates available to end users (unlike Apple), this sounds like a recipe for widespread confusion to us — something that Microsoft seems to have a knack for with its operating systems…

The Windows Phone demo itself is pretty interesting, if only for the fact that Microsoft seems to have finally realised that Windows Mobile was far too difficult to use. The new user interface is clearly inspired by that of its Zune media player, but the video still shows a fair number of fiddly clicks with fingernail and a jerky response (although that could obviously be a hardware-related issue) — compare that with the smooth, finger-friendly UI's of both the iPhone and Google Android.

We won't write off Windows Phone until we've seen it for ourselves, but it looks like that it won't be the dramatic improvement that Windows Mobile needs to compete with the iPhone in the ease-of-use stakes.