[sc:mobile-category ]So I made some predictions on Monday about what would be unveiled today and so now it’s time to see how close I was.
First off, you can go here to get the highlights of the announcement.
What I got right, which includes anything that had a probability of less than 40%:
- New home screen details (more types of live tiles, maybe a horizontal view and groups) – 100%
- Demo of some Skype Integration – 80%
- Demo of FULL Skype Integration – 30%
- Dual core support – 100%
- multiple resolutions – 100%
- New hardware demo unit – %100
- Release date of Q4 – 80%
- Release date of Q3 – 19%
- Release date of Q1/13 – 1%
- New maps functionality – 75%
- New voice functionality – 60%
- Game demo – 100%
- NT Kernel in Apollo – 100%
- New camera functionality – 20%
- Upgradeability announcement for all WP7 devices – 0%
- Upgradeability announcement for most WP7 devices – 30%
What I got wrong:
- Quad core support – 5%
- Developers tools preview/beta/rc – 90%
What I was not right or wrong about:
- Upgradeability announcement for some Wp7 devices – 60%
- No upgradeability announcement – 30%
I’m including the “upgradability for some” in the not right/wrong category as they did announce no upgrades for Windows Phone 7 hardware but did announce Windows Phone 7.8 which will bring a lot of the features of WP8 to WP7 devices.
Overall, I was pretty close 🙂
I was very surprised they didn’t announce some developers tools, but I guess those are coming later in the summer so we’ll have to wait to see them.
They also announcement a few other items that I didn’t predict, here are some of my first thoughts on them as well as on some of the ones I did predict:
- SD Card support: About friken time! The didn’t say, but hopefully it will include cards greater than 32g.
- NFC Support: Meh, my phone won’t replace my wallet until government agencies accept it as ID and that doesn’t appear likely any time soon.
- IE10:10 better than 9!
- Wallet: See NFC above.
- Map upgrades: Turn by turn will be nice as well as offline support.
- New Start screen: My first impression was “My that looks busy!”. I’m sure there were a lot of internal discussions on this as the simplistic design aesthetic of WP7 has given way to a much busier screen.
- WP 7.8: This should keep most 7.5 users happy and I expect a lot of the user experience improvements in WP8 that haven’t been announced but aren’t hardware/os dependent to be included in the update as well (like whatever changes they make to mail and messaging, etc.).
- Native Code: ’bout time MS. Good move.
- In-app payments: Meh, just making developers lives easier so it’s a good thing.
- Integrated VOIP: YES! YES! YES! I want my SIP number to ring through to my WP and be able to make calls with it!
- Multitasking: Makes everything better.
- WP@Work: These upgrades are nice, bringing these features will make a definite difference to enterprise adoption.
- Languages: Good to have, no impact to me thought.
- OTA Updates: I know lots of people see this as important, but no one I know doesn’t have a PC of some kind…
