Mobile | EighTwOne (821)

Windows Phone 7, shouldn’t that be Windows Mobile 7? Yes and No. Windows Phone 7 (WP7) is the successor to Windows Mobile 6, but the rebranding also hints at changes in the approach towards Windows Phone 7, being a mobile platform instead of an operating system. At first glance WP7 is very social networking, multimedia and game focused. The (clean and neat) GUI is also full of animations when you interact with it. I wonder what that will mean for battery life.

You can watch the recording of the press conference from Mobile World Congress 2010 here. For more information on WP7, check out Engadget’s hands-on review here or check out the online demo here.

Update: More information in this hands-on demo on Channel 9 here.

Today Sony Ericsson released a new phone, the Aspen. Normally that wouldn’t be worth blogging here, but the press release contained something of interest:

Operating system: Windows Mobile® 6.5.3

So, that might imply Windows Mobile 6.5.3 is now official. Exchange-wise nothing changed; changes are mainly UI focused or under the hood. These include capacitive touchscreen support, multi-touch, touch controls (bye stylus), consistency, horizontal scroll bar instead of tabs, magnifier, Start Menu drag & drop, increased browser performance (IE), improved memory management, smoothed pan & flick gestures and speed improved zoom & rotation speed. It also contains updated runtime tools (.NET CF 3.5 and SQL CE 3.1) as well as Arabic read/write document support.

Also, it seems Sony Ericsson licensed SPB Mobile Shell as both Pro and Lifestyle models contain SPB Mobile Shell 3.0. Apparantly plain Windows Mobile isn’t appealing enough; Sony uses SPB Mobile Shell and HTC has HTC Sense UI.