Mysterious Samsung "Link" coming to Bell this month?
[Via Unwired View]
windows mobile posts
Right about the time Kindle for iPhone hit the App Store, Amazon's true intentions in the e-book space started to become clear: it wasn't about dominating the market end-to-end with Amazon-branded equipment. It never was; that's Apple's game, of course, but Bezos and Company were taking a starkly different tack. Instead, Amazon almost seemed to shout "please, someone else do this for us" by creating powerful, well-intentioned devices in the original Kindle, the Kindle 2, and the Kindle DX that scream "reference design" more than they scream to would-be customers buying on sex appeal or real-world ergonomics. It's clear now that Kindle is a platform, not a piece of hardware, and Amazon's specialty is the same as it has been since day one of the Washington-based company -- delivering content. If people buy Kindles in the course of discovering the platform, Amazon figures that's all well and good, but the ultimate goal is to bring them into that content ecosystem at any cost, which means building software that can extend Kindle support to as many platforms as humanly possible. After tackling the iPhone, rumors are swirling that Windows Mobile may be next on news that the company is actively hiring WinMo engineers; the timing would certainly be right with the imminent launch of 6.5 and the Windows Marketplace, and if there's one thing that could help keep the WinMo loyal in the fray for another build, it might be a stellar e-reader. Granted, there are already great e-readers out there for the platform, but how many tap into the Kindle universe?
Ready for even more rumors about Windows Mobile 7 and Microsoft's mysterious "Pink" smartphone project? Good, cause we've got a few -- and the first is potentially huge. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley says her best understanding of "Pink" is now that it's a Microsoft-branded phone running a custom UI on top of Windows Mobile 7, developed by what's left of the Danger team and targeted at the Sidekick market. Yep, Microsoft-branded -- as in, the exact thing Microsoft has been denying for ages now. What's more, Redmond wouldn't be letting third parties use this new UI -- Pink would be manufactured only by Sharp or Motorola, who've made Sidekicks in the past. It all makes sense, even if it does feel a bit like MS is knifing its partners in the back -- companies like HTC and Samsung have been equally aggressive in layering their own UIs like TouchFLO 3D and TouchWiz on top of WinMo, but it's another thing entirely to compete against Microsoft itself, especially now that AdWeek says Microsoft's selected an agency to develop a Pink ad campaign. Yeah, things are starting to get a little wild -- we haven't even mentioned the open questions of whether the Zune HD is running Tegra because it's based on Windows Mobile 7 Chassis 1, or whether Pink will launch on Verizon, or whether Zune will appear on other phones, or... you get the idea. Hey Microsoft -- you want to clear any of this up by shipping some products?
So Microsoft France's product manager for Windows Mobile, Audrey Zolghadr, is saying that the company's upcoming Windows Marketplace launch will be accompanied by around 600 apps certified and available on day one. Depending on your perspective, that's either ridiculously anemic -- the iPhone's App Store has a couple orders of magnitude more currently available, for example -- or a veritable cornucopia. Though the Ovi Store has no shortage of "items" to buy, an overwhelming majority of those are currently wallpapers, ringtones, and the like, and Palm's App Catalog launched with so few apps that many folks (we're not naming names) literally had every app installed within a few minutes of buying the phone. At the end of the day, it's all about signal-to-noise ratio; if Microsoft can deliver 600 apps and half of those are terrific, they're on the right track -- though at this point, we're thinking the next battle in Smartphone Platform Wars doesn't really kick off until WinMo 7 swings by anyway.





