Microsoft’s next-generation operating system for mobile phones isn’t expected to launch for at least a few more months. But the company has started sending out demo units to a handful of reviewers. And the results are… interesting. Engadget and Gizmodo have both written up fairly lengthy articles about the phones they’ve received with a pre-release version of Windows Phone 7. Neither seems all that impressed. Here are some of the highlights:

Engadget:

• The user interface is speedy and responsive to touch.
• The UI is divided between homepage tiles, an app list, and hub pages .
• There’s a drop-down menu for notifications (like Android) instead of pop up alerts (like iOS).
• There’s no copy and paste.
• Third party apps don’t support multitasking (like playing music in the background).
• The on-screen keyboard rocks.
• The People app is a mess, which adds social networking data to your contact list whether you want it or not.
• The web browser includes desktop browser code, and is almost as fast as Safari on an iPhone 4.
• There’s no support for Adobe Flash or Silverlight in the browser.
• Mobile Office has some handy social features, but not a lot of editing features — you can’t change fonts, for instance.

Gizmodo:

• Windows Phone 7′s biggest strength is probably integration of Microsoft services including Bing, Zune, Xbox Live, and Office.
• The “hubs” are sort of like multi-page, multi-faceted apps. For instance, the people hub has a screen for contacts, flick to see  a news feed, flick again to see recent contacts, and so forth.
• There’s no support for widgets, but the Live Tiles on the home screen show live updates of things like incoming email messages.
• The keyboard looks like it should suck… but like Engadget, Gizmodo seems to really like it.
• “The Outlook app might be the best mail app on any phone.”

You can check out a hands-on video with the prototype from Engadget after the break.

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Apple charges $99 per year for the MobileMe service which, among other things, allows users to locate a missing phone on a map and remotely lock their device or wipe their data to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. Yesterday Research in Motion announced that it would soon offer a similar service called BlackBerry Protect… but for free. And today Microsoft is getting in on the action, with the announcement of Windows Phone Live, a free web-based service that will, among other things, let you locate a phone, remotely lock it, erase data, or make it ring.

But while BlackBerry Protect is aimed primarily at security, Windows Phone Live is much more than that. Basically, it’s integrated with Microsoft’s other Windows Live services, including SkyDrive. That means that Windows Phone 7 users will have 25GB of free online storage space for storing files in the cloud.

Microsoft describes Windows Phone Live as a “central place to see pictures they’ve published, view their Windows Live calendar and contacts,” and access OneNote files and other data that you can share between your phone and the Windows Live web site.

It’s not entirely clear from today’s announcement — but it sounds like there’s a chance that Windows Phone Live might incorporate some of the technology from the ill-fated KIN Studio software. While the Microsoft KIN phones were a huge flop, the KIN Studio actually seemed like a pretty neat web-based solution for organizing photos, videos, text messages, and other data. Update: Alas, ZDNet reports that the new service won’t use anything developed by the KIN team.

Well that didn’t take long. Just a little over two months after introducing a new feature phone platform, Microsoft is killing off the KIN project.

The KIN platform was basically a stripped down Windows CE-based operating system with a heavy focus on social media apps and no support for third party apps. It was aimed at young people who wanted to do more than make calls and send text messages with their phones, but who didn’t want or need a full fledged smartphone and app store.

It’s not entirely clear if that market actually exists. But it’s likely that a bigger problem was that the first two KIN phones shipped with monthly data plans that were priced about the same as a smartphone data plan.

Microsoft plans to continue offering the KIN One and KIN Two phones in the US for a while — probably until the current stock is sold out. But the company will not launch the phones in Europe as had been planned, and the KIN team will join the Windows Phone 7 team, which means that the standalone KIN platform is for all intents and purposes dead. But we may see some of the KIN technology in Windows Phone 7 down the road.

Google has rolled out an updated version of the Google Docs viewer for mobile devices that lets you view DOC, DOCX, PPT, and PDF on most mobile devices running Android, iOS, WebOS, BlackBerry OS, or other mobile operating systems.

The main difference seems to be that files uploaded in those formats now seem to feature better formatting on mobile devices. But you still can’t edit documents in those formats — although you can edit individual cells on spreadsheets using a rather clunky interface.

Honestly, Google’s blog post announcing the new viewer seems to have caused a bit of confusion, with some web sites claiming that Excel spreadsheets aren’t supported (not true), or that these features have been included all along (partially true). But Google is assuring us that something’s new… and I’m not 100% certain that you could view DOCX files last week, so that’s a possibility.

Have you noticed any new functionality in the Google Docs mobile viewer this week?

Adobe has been offering a beta version of Flash Player 10.1 for Google Android for the past few months, but it only works with devices running Google Android 2.2. Officially, the OS isn’t available to the general public yet, but there are already a few folks running pre-release versions of Android 2.2 on the Google Nexus One and other phones who have been testing Flash 10.1 for a while. Today Adobe removed the beta label, announcing the final build of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for Mobile.

Adobe’s press release drops a few hints about phones that are expected to be updated to Android 2.2 Froyo soon, including:

• Dell Streak
• Google Nexus One
• HTC Evo
• HTC Desire
• HTC Incredible
• Motorola Droid
• Motorola Milestone
• Samsung Galaxy S

Adobe is also making Flash Player 10.1 available for BlackBerry and WebOS devices as well as “future versions of “Windows Phone, LiMo, MeeGo, and Symbian. Noticeably absent from the list of supported platforms is iOS, but that was Apple’s choice, not Adobe’s.

Ultimately, you’ll be able to download and install the app on phones running supported operating systems, but it will be up to device makers to make the software available. Adobe is also working with device makers to pre-install Flash Player 10.1 on smartphones, tablets, and othermobile devices.

I’m running Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta on my Nexus One and haven’t been prompted to update yet, but I suspect the new version should be available soon.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the company is getting ready to launch a mobile operating system aimed at enterprise users soon. But don’t expect anything quite as dramatic a departure from earlier mobile software from Microsoft as Windows Phone 7. Because the new OS will be based on Windows Mobile 6.5… and next year the company plans to introduce a new version that’s based on Windows Phone 7.

The new OS will be called Windows Embedded Handheld, and it will likely support features that you won’t find on consumer oriented devices, such as a push-to-scan button for operating a barcode scanner.

Microsoft has been pushing Windows Phone 7 pretty heavily as a consumer oriented device, with social networking and Xbox Live integration. But the platform will also support Microsoft Exchange synchronization and other features that are important to enterprise users.

I’m guessing some of the main differences between Windows Embedded Handheld and Windows Phone 7 will be a streamlined, more business-like user interface and possibly support for third party skins or custom user interfaces — something which Microsoft seems to be discouraging for the consumer version of Windows Phone 7.

One of the first devices to ship with the Windows Mobile 6.5-based version of Windows Embedded Handheld will be the Motorola ES400, a ruggedized phone for enterprise customers.

Microsoft is completely shaking up its development platform with Windows Phone 7, which means that apps that were designed to run on earlier versions of Windows Mobile won’t work on WP7 when it’s released later this year. That’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world, since it means that the new operating system will run apps that were actually designed to take advantage of all its features… but that only works if there are actually apps worth running.

To that end, it looks like Microsoft is trying to tempt iPhone app developers to port some of their programs to run on Windows Phone 7. PocketGamer.biz reports that at least one iPhone developer has been approached by Microsoft about porting his work to run on the new platform. And Microsoft offered to sweeten the pot by offering a decent amount of cash up front.

Either that means that Microsoft really wants to make sure there are some high quality third party apps on launch day, or the company’s not convinced that developers will see enough potential profit in porting games and other apps on their own, so the company is offering bribes. Read it however you like.

Thing is, it’s not all that simple to port a game from iPhone to Windows Phone 7. Microsoft’s development tools for the platform are Silverlight and XNA… which aren’t all that similar to the C++ tools used by iPhone developers.

via Engadget

Google offers a pretty decent mobile version of Google Reader for smartphones. You can access it by visiting google.com/reader using the default Android or iPhone web browsers. If you have another mobile device though, or if you use an alternate web browser, there’s a good chance you’re going to be stuck looking at a very stripped down version of Google Reader that only shows you 10 items at a time in an over-simplified format.

At least that’s what I usually see when I visit Google Reader using Internet Explore for Windows Mobile. While I suspect Google may offer improved formatting for the Windows Phone 7 web browser, it looks like you won’t have to use the web browser to access Google Reader.

G:RSS is a standalone Windows Phone 7 App designed to let you interact with your Google Reader account without opening Internet Explorer. You can read all items, or a feed or category. Unread items will be highlighted, and all pages are pre-buffered, which means that when you flip from one page of items to the next, the transition should be pretty smooth.

You can also click on any item to open the full article withing G:RSS without opening a web browser (although I assume that if you’re looking at a partial feed, you’ll have to click a link to open the full article in a browser). You can mark items as read, or unread, or start items using G:RSS.

You can check out a demo video showing G:RSS running on the Windows Phone 7 emulator after the break.

via The Mobile Blog

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Technically, Google has always been a place where people go to answer questions. But now if you’re using a mobile web browser, an Android phone, or the Google app for iPhone, you can get answers to some questions without even bothering to click a link. Basically, Google will provides answers to some search queries at the top of the results page.

For instance, you can search for state our country capitols, movie release dates, musician birthdays, and other similar information. Not all questions will give you a result, not by a long shot. But anything that can reduce the number of clicks you have to make on your phone when looking up information is a good thing. Even if it doesn’t always work. The good thing in this case is that even if you don’t get a Google Answer, you do get a list of web sites that very well may have answers to your question.

Microsoft’s insistence that Windows Phone 7 developers write apps in Silverlight or XNA, but not the same native code that Microsoft’s default apps will use. While that’s probably fine for most third party apps, some developers have already said they won’t write apps for Windows Phone 7 since they won’t have deep enough access to the operating system to run properly. Mozilla, for instance, has already stated that it won’t be developing a version of the Firefox web browser for Windows Phone 7.

But it turns out things might not be quite as cut and dry as we thought. In an interview with TechRadar, Microsoft senior director Paul Ryan says that if there’s enough demand for alternate web browsers, then Microsoft will “enable our partners to do that.”

So it looks like we could see some third party apps using native code, including web browsers such as Opera or Fennec. But I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting. At the very least, it doesn’t look like we’ll see any third party browsers when Windows Phone 7 first launches later this year.