Microsoft’s annual developer conference has been running since the Twelfth of April in Las Vegas, earlier today though Joe Belfiore, took the stage for the Day 2 Keynote at “Mix 11”. Why is that such a big deal, well he details what can be expected, improvement wise in the next update for Windows Phone, code named Mango. Most notably, the features we’ve been waiting for, multitasking, hardware accelerated IE9 mobile,
Twitter integration, better Office cloud integration and much more. This update isn’t expected to be available till at least Q3, if not Q4 of 2011, and considering the frustration many have felt over the first series of updates, that have not rolled out to all users worldwide at the moment.
The whole conference is geared at developers, but obviously when giving an address like this, a modicum of theatrics are employed to initially captivate the audience, draw them in so to speak. Back at the start of March I posted a comparison between a user/fan produced Advert, and a Microsoft made Advert for Windows phone, and to quote myself
The video above is a user made promo, that is enthralling, and rather retro, but it rivals Microsoft’s own advertising. Give the guy a job Microsoft!
Actually, let me ask, do we have Brandon Foy in the audience up here somewhere? Brandon Foy? Can you come up here Brandon? That video you all just saw, Brandon made. I want to introduce Brandon. I don’t think Brandon knew we were going to do this; here, turn around. Brandon is 24, is that right? 24, and Brandon just made a fan video on his own, accurate? Posted on YouTube. A bunch of people forwarded it to us and said, “Man, this video is great, you guys should make TV commercials like this video.”
They’ve issued the maker a bit f a challenge, 200,000 views on YouTube and we’ll use it. We should all get behind him when it comes out.
Belfiore also addressed the Update process, which is probably more pertinent to the user on the street, than developers, new features are great, but if we can’t actually have them deployed in a timely manner to our devices, will we actually wait for them? It’s probably the biggest hurdle Microsoft has to leap, to keep it’s Windows Phone user base interested.
The first thing that a lot of people have asked about is why are the updates later than we expected? When we did our announcement we said that we’d have the copy-paste update available early in the year. We had expected it to be earlier than now. It’s now rolling out. It’s not available to everyone yet because some mobile operators are still testing it
Read: Don’t just blame us, the carriers are mucking around with it!
We had finished our software, handed it off to our team that does the update process, and they actually started deploying to update, but what happened was we found issues with the way the update was getting deployed on phones because of things that we hadn’t anticipated that happened as real phones were manufactured
Read: We had approved all these devices to run the OS, but when we decided to release updates, we hadn’t thoroughly tested the update on all the devices.
We’ve done lost of testing on pre-manufactured phones, but as phones were coming off the manufacturing line, some of them had characteristics that we hadn’t seen before. One example was less than 100 phones coming from one of the handset vendors had a manufacturing setting that was left on the phone to indicate that something had gone wrong in flashing the phone in manufacturing. The phones got out in the wild, they worked OK for end users, but when we tried to apply the updates, it switched the phone back into a factory diagnostic mode, so the update didn’t work correctly.
Read: The OEM’s were at fault!
Yada, yada, yada, the smoke and mirrors and passing the buck goes on for quite a long time. Read the original transcript here and form your own opinion. I don’t want to be to negative about the update process, and I look forward to the next one, and the features it will bring.
Watch the full keynote here, and let me know what you think about the improvements to the OS in the upcoming update. Do you think you might take on a Windows Phone running “Mango”
