Remember the old adage about Microsoft: "It take them 3 god to get something right"? (1) Windows Mobile, (2) Kin, (3) WinMo7
Have you used WinMo7? It's really nice (and this from an Android fan).
I'm not sure it will save Nokia, but read a few reviews of WinMo7 ans go and have a play before you dismiss it entirely.
(Edit: WinMo7's biggest problem is it's name. "Windows" is a huge liability because everyone associates it with desktop windows even though it shares no common code at all)
[Edit: reading further I've found Windows Mobile 2003 (and, I assume, 2003 SE) was based on CE 4.2, so numbers 5 and 5.5 should become 4.x and following numbers reduced by one]
sorry if I've touched a nerve there. I've never said (on this forum or elsewhere) a bad word about WP7. I've never seen one but I'm quite willing to believe all the positive things I've read about it. I was just having a light dig at your '3 attempts' remark, that's all
The problem is that people think WinPhone7 competes with Google/Apple. It doesn't. It competes with Blackberry and will eat their lunch. If they can get some consumers to go along for the ride too it will be great but WinPhone7's differentiating feature will be a decent UI (better than blackberry and on par with Apple/Google) and excellent enterprise integration (which will be on par with blackberry), as well as leveraging the enterprise developer toolchain (Visual Studio). Once those are in place it's just a matter of offering incentives to get enterprises to ditch Blackberry. Blackberry is the next Lotus Notes.
People here (many/most of whom fall into the minority of people not using Windows as their exclusive OS) also seem to think that the Windows association is a bad thing, or that the average user is savvy enough to realise that the phone and desktop OSs have virtually nothing whatsoever in common under the hood.
If I were MS I'd double down on the association and launch a massive campaign based on their Office Win 7 phone apps, ensuring they enable a few token features that the Blackberry apps don't. Even if the extra "integration" is really superficial, enterprise IT purchasers aren't known for making the best decisions.
And this is exactly why MS will eat blackberrys lunch. Just wait until enterprise clients can order the Dell optiplex win phone 7 that acts just like a desktop as far as the IT staff is concerned. The first VS dev that shows a dashboard app that displays KPIs from the CRM to an executive will seal the fate of blackberry in that company. The only really powerful lockin that BB has is Pin to pin or BBM as I think they call it now. Phones arent yet powerful enough that a phone from 3 years ago still performs adequately, there are probably 3 or 4 cycles left to really change hardware/OS market share.
the difference between Blackberry and Lotus Notes is that Notes is and has always been universally despised whereas Blackberry has always had a very loyal following
Have you used WinMo7? It's really nice (and this from an Android fan).
I'm not sure it will save Nokia, but read a few reviews of WinMo7 ans go and have a play before you dismiss it entirely.
(Edit: WinMo7's biggest problem is it's name. "Windows" is a huge liability because everyone associates it with desktop windows even though it shares no common code at all)