14 DAY TRIAL // Window Phone 7 managed to draw a crowd during Microsoft’s TechEd 2010 conference in Europe this week, an indication of strong enthusiasm and anticipation around the new Windows mobile platform as well as the devices it comes with. The images accompanying this article are from the second day of the Berlin event, November 9th 2010.
After a number of extremely interesting meetings with Microsoft representatives I headed over to the showcases and mingled a bit.
It was already late in the afternoon, and the vast majority of the participants were locked into various workshops and sessions, leaving me enough elbow room to move around and snap some pictures.
In the hall reserved for Microsoft offerings, the Windows Phone 7 booth was the most crowded, while the majority of other showcases draw in less attention from participants.
I still had to sit in line and wait for my turn to play around with the HTC devices on display, the Mozart and the HD7.
And this was late in the second day of the conference. In the first day, right after the keynote, the crowd around the Windows Phone 7 booth was far more impressive and waiting times to get to the actual devices quite long.
Both HTC Mozart and HD7 are first-class smartphones, and Windows Phone 7 truly shines. Even at TechEd in Berlin I read estimates that Microsoft and its partners had sold approximately 40,000 devices in the first day of the US launch which happened on November 8th.
But inside Messe Berlin I got to experience first-hand people around me trying out Windows Phone 7.
It’s clear to me that Microsoft and smartphone vendors selling WP7 devices will push an increasingly number of phones in the future.
The new operating system from the software giant is impressive, with the Metro UI bringing to the table something completely new, and different from rival offerings. The GUI is an entirely new approach, extremely snappy, intuitive, impressively user friendly and a pleasure to use.
Having already seen what iPhone, Android devices and future Nokia smartphones have to offer, I’ll say that without a doubt users of Windows Phone 7 will get the feeling that their devices make them stand out of the crowd for the minute they start using them.
Strong competition on the mobile market has certainly been healthy for Microsoft, with Windows Phone 7 being ages away from its predecessor Windows Mobile 6.5.
