Microsoft has signed off on the next version of its smartphone OS: now the complicated dance with its carriers and handset vendors begins.
Microsoft has signed off the code for the "Mango" version of its Windows Phone operating system - officially, the code has RTM'd (been released to manufacturing) - according to the Windows Team Blog.
There, Terry Myerson, the corporate vice-president on the Windows Phone team (basically, the day-to-day manager), explains that "this marks the point in the development process where we hand code to our handset and mobile operator partners to optimize Mango for their specific phone and network configurations."
(See our previous coverage about Windows Phone Mango for an idea of what it includes.)
The good news: this is slightly ahead of where it had been expected to be (and certainly miles better than the original release of Windows Phone, which got caught up in internal battles within the Entertainment & Device division over the Kin - Project Pink, from the $500m acquisition of Danger - and the rewrite of Windows Mobile).
The bad news: it's going to be called "Windows Phone 7.5". We liked Mango. We'll stick with that for now.
So it's end-July, and the code is going out now, so they've got the whole of August... so that should mean release in September, right? Afraid not. The complicated dance involved in getting phone code right includes an extra layer that you don't have with the release of Windows OS to OEM PC makers: the carriers.
So to get Mango into peoples' hands (or retailers' shops) the processes to be navigated are:
• handset makers have to test Mango against their new designs to make sure that the code runs really well on their systems
• handset makers have to test Mango against their old designs to make sure the code won't cause disastrous things to happen, and that in fact only good things happen - not even indifferent ones. This didn't quite work with the first update to Windows Phone (the "pre-NoDo" update), which messed up some LG phones when it rolled out in April.
• the handset makers (which will include Nokia) have to take their phones to the carriers and allow them to test them against their networks. All carriers insist on this as a condition of phones going on the network - especially new phones; it's the same for Apple. (New iPhones are sent to carriers in sealed boxes so that the software can be tested.)
• if everything is hunky dory, then the carriers will let the handset makers know. This depends of course on the slowest carrier to respond, generally.
This year there's a bigger problem though: lots of Android phones and of course those new iPhones - expected in September - which are in the queue ahead of the Windows Phone Mango phones. That's potentially a traffic jam that will hold things up.
That means, overall, that you shouldn't expect the Mango update to be rolled out, or the new Windows Phones (including Nokia's Sea Ray - no doubt they'll find a more thrilling name, such as N9487) to appear before October.
Which is what I've been telling you since February, at least in regard to Nokia.
You might also ponder quite how Mango is going to fare in the new OS world that it will be pitched into. Many said that Windows Phone wasn't competitive when first released (no cut+paste, and various other things). Mango is a big improvement. The Windows Team blog notes that it will have threading to bring conversations with a single person across multiple connections (IM, email, text) into a single view; multitasking; and Internet Explorer 9. No word on Flash.
The question is whether it's going to be big enough once Apple's iOS 5 is released, and whether there will be the next version of Android - codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich - available by then. That's expected to have componnents such as face tracking, a new app launcher, USB hosting (for a game controller), and simpler updates. Given that Android's notifications system is just about perfect but (in my view) its Gingerbread keyboard system is dire, perhaps the UI improvements will be there.
Whichever, Mango isn't going to have a soft landing.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/jul/27/windows-phone-mango-rtm
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