Mobile World Congress: Windows Phone 7 Announced!

What is with these companies and terrible names? First we had the iPad and now we have the Windows Phone 7.  T-Mobile sent me a phone with Windows 6.5 on it over the holidays the operating system was so awful I didn’t even write the review. I felt so sorry and bad for the folks at MS for the longest time they were the company that just couldn’t do anything right and Win Mobile 6.5 was further proof of that. Today, the company has finally done what everyone has been screaming for them to do for the last year – just put the ZuneHD on a Phone and call it day. How hard is that? Apparently, not that hard they have gone and done it and it’s one sexy beast!  The new operating system is the ZuneHD with one new notable addition – X-Box Live Anywhere built into the operating system. Microsoft still isn’t going to build a phone themselves (although, rumors persist that they are working on a phone aimed at teenagers), instead they are going to hold a tight rein on the Windows Phone 7.

The problem with Windows Mobile in the past was they licensed the operating system out to hardware makers and let them do whatever they wanted with the software, which is one of the many reasons Windows Mobile phones have been wildly inconsistent, cluttered, junked up, and generally unusable. This time they are going to have a standard criteria for all Windows 7 Phones including buttons, minimum hardware specs, etc. So the first batch of phones will pretty much all be the same. They are currently working with all the major carriers and plan on having phones on the store shelves this holiday season.