I just wanted to provide a quick update since it’s been days since my last post. I’m in New Zealand this week, and though I’m finally heading home today (Saturday, here at least) and have been preoccupied with the events here, I’ve been thinking a lot about Windows Phone 8 and this book.
Like many of you, I’m disappointed with Nokia’s inability to market itself or its products effectively. The world’s critical reactions to this week’s event—at which Nokia launched (or, really, “previewed”) its upcoming Lumia 920 and 820 devices is sadly representative of the pro-Apple climate we now live in and of course exasperated by Nokia not announcing release date(s), pricing, or carrier availability.
Like many of you, too, I have my theories about why that happened. Really, it doesn’t matter.
Windows Phone 8 is architecturally a major change. They are moving from a Windows CE core to a Windows (NT) core. This is huge, and as big a deal as moving from Windows 9x to NT with Windows XP back in 2001.
But the reality is that Windows Phone 8 is an evolutionary update from a user experience standpoint. If you use and/or understand Windows Phone 7.x today, moving to Windows Phone 8 will be obvious and even seamless. Yes, there are a ton of excellent new features in there, but there is no single major change. This is evolution, but good evolution. Windows Phone was already excellent, so there’s no need to go back to the drawing board.
The marketing stuff—Microsoft’s weird desire to hide the final end user features in Windows Phone 8, Nokia’s silly inability to explain itself—doesn’t matter much to the book. The core changes are important, sort of, but how much time can we really spend on what is essentially background material? Ultimately, the book is about the user experience. And in Windows Phone 8, that means everything that was right about Windows Phone 7.x—which is to say, most of it—plus the fun/useful new stuff we’re getting in Windows Phone 8.
Put another way, it’s all good news.
I’ll try to write up the final notes on the Summit so I can look at updating our very raw TOC and then move on to the next event. I suppose I need to start actually writing the book soon as well. Given that so much of what’s in Windows Phone 8 is already there in Windows Phone 7.x, it might make sense to start with some areas that aren’t expected to change (or change much).