marypcbuk

I don't often get to write one of those stories that gets picked up everywhere because I don't often break news, but sometimes it happens and this is one of them: at Teched, Joe Marini of the IE on Windows Phone team told me IE9 for WP7 is code complete and I covered the details for TechRadar: It's faster and it's almost finished - but it still won't have Flash. I've been under the weather with a cold and back problems (I coughed so hard I put my back out; it's almost funny except it hurts) and Maker Faire meetings, so it was a surprise when @sbisson mentioned that my story was getting referenced on lots of sites. Scoop! ;-)

Several of them use it as evidence to speculate that whatever gets announced at the Mango press conference tomorrow, it won't be shipping finished code. I completely agree; not only did Marini tell me they're working on debug and performance. but in an interview I did with Paul Bryan about the business features in Mango that will be on ZDNet UK soon he mentioned that both the Lync features and the UI for conversation view were still under development last week. The Windows Phone team code fast - but not that fast. My opinion? Mango is feature locked and we'll get details of everything in it, dates for the rollout of updates to operators and a beta SDK for dvelopers with an emulator that gets updated once the code is more finished.

The same Web page will load at different speeds on the same phone on the same network five minutes apart, so hard figures aren't always meaningful and I saw the expected variance in my Windows Phone 7 tests, but I've seen a couple of questions about it so here's my averaged results, testing on Orange with Android 2.2 on a Nexus One and WP7 on a Samsung Omnia and O2 with an iPhone 4, with and without wi-fi turned on. In these particualr tests at this particualr time, Android and Windows Phone 7 were both faster than the iPhone for the Flickr page, and Mobile IE was consistently a couple of seconds faster than Android; Microsoft says they've put a lot of work into optimising image downloads and it shows. More repeatably, the main thing I saw was that most of the time Windows Phone 7 loaded pages pretty much as fast as the other phones, a couple of times it sat for a while, not doing much - and that could be more about the network stack or the OS transport than the browser itself. I need to do more testing to be sure.

*yes really, yes, repeatably.



You can read my in-depth, at-length review over at TechRadar; I have caveats but I'm impressed with what I've seen so far. There are drawbacks (every mobile OS has flaws today) and I need to see how it handles as a main phone over time when I have a handset for long enough to do that, but I'm impressed with what Microsoft delivered in the time they had. Now they have to keep up the pace.

It's hard to get people on the record about things that are controversial to customers and sound business sense to vendors; dubious labour practices in the developing world, the tensions of partnering with competitors, where search engines make their money, bundled applications...

We call it crapware, PC makers call it differentiation, value add and an alternative revenue stream. PC buyers get free, discount or at least pre-installed software, vendors get money; what's not to like? Slowing down your PC, clogging up Windows and requiring you to know what's worth keeping and what you should delete on sight (and how to get rid of the most persistent offenders), that's what's not to like. Crapware makes Windows look bad - and it makes PC makers look bad when grindingly slow security software grinds older PCs to a literal halt. I don't want it on phones either, which is why I'm delighted that all network and OEM apps can be installed in Windows Phone 7 (the HTC Evo I brought back from the US is forever cursed with Sprint sports apps and I used to resent getting out-of-date Yahoo! mobile tools on Windows Mobile, all taking up precious space). Microsoft can't tell PC makers what to put in their copies of Windows (that's one of the results of the DoJ case against Microsoft) but I still expect them to be naming and shaming apps, device drivers and OEM crapware setups that make Windows look bad.

When I praised the Internet Explorer team for doing just that with add-ins, I was delighted to get some hard figures from  Mike Angiulo, the corporate vice president of the Microsoft Planning and PC Ecosystem team on where the decisions to do that kind of thing come from. He talked about how things were much worse in the Vista days, calling it "kind of the worst era of PCs when nobody was thinking about the final PC as an end-to-end system" and he's right - but crapware is still endemic. Every new machine we've seen recently apart from the Sony VAIO P has been loaded with a mix of useful tools and performance-killing crapware. Microsoft needs to keep applying pressure, which is what I say in the piece...

I've had some feedback about the headline the piece was published under ('Microsoft slams OEM crapware') being, shall we say, on the negative side. All headlines are there to grab your attention, and I think this is a topic that needs to get some attention. I expect a headline that like will cause some headaches in Redmond if the OEM partners take it personally, but I also know that every time I write a piece on this topic I get feedack from readers that they want the PC makers to hear the pain crapware causes them and the mistakently-bad impression of Windows it gives people. I'm going to keep saying that Microsoft has a hard job to do here, but it has to keep the pressure on.

Windows Phone 7 is doing the right thing here. When I asked Oded Ran about removing network or OEM apps from devices, he gave exactly the right answer. The phone buyer is the customer, it's their phone and they can do what they want; any app can be hidden - or uninstalled really easily. It takes seconds. Getting unwanted extras off a PC should be just as easy and fast. If PC makers want to add value and get their software bounty, create a Device Stage that offers the apps and lets me install them if I want - don't pre-install them, have them all start up and make it hard to unweave add-ins, plugins, toolbars, updaters and the rest just to get back to the Windows should have been when I first turned it on. Or as Mike Angiulo put it, bundled software is great "if it's executed well and it makes sense and it doesn't degrade the core performance of the PC". Maybe a few controversial headlines will make sure the PC makers keep listening to him...