The Rubbish Microsoft Zune Phone

Phoning people. Sending text messages. Mobile data services.

That’s what you need a phone to do.

And will the much rumoured Microsoft Zune Phone do this? We shall see.

Devin Coldewey at CrunchGear reckons that Microsoft is in, “…Pole position to announce something like a Zune phone.”

“Could this coming January hold the surprise announcement everyone wants to hear?” he asks.

No.

Is the short answer.

Microsoft have continually delivered rubbish operating system after rubbish operating system and I tell you, it’s going to take a heckuvalot to persuade me that they can deliver anything other than another damp squid.

Windows Mobile has it’s fans in the enterprise. That’s fine but in today’s fast-paced consumer market, Windows gets stuffed by the competition.

The annoyance for me is that normobs buy Windows Mobile devices. They DO buy them. Based on the research I’ve done — all of it anecdotal I should point out — they don’t buy again.

It’s easy to be wowed by the HTC ‘HD’ devices. They are *gorgeous*. Beautifully engineered in many cases. Entirely let down by the operating system.

Microsoft have made improvements.

They’ve glossed over the delays and the crashes by making a reasonably attractive front-end interface.

This doesn’t help when you try and do an instant message conversation, send an email and browse the web simultaneously. It just wilny’wurk. As they say in Scotland.

And that isn’t my reading of Windows Mobile. It’s supposed to be better than that.

Almost three years ago I was writing publicly about how shit Windows Mobile was. And I tell you, it fills me full of negative confidence to find out that I’m right and a trillion dollar company and all their Windows Mobile resources is wrong.

I can break your Windows Mobile device in 10 seconds by doing as I described above. Run MSN, do some web browsing, have it try and stream something and check your email. Watch it melt. THEN phone it. And watch it forget what sodding day it is.

Can they pull a Zune phone out and shock the planet?

Meh.

We shall see.

Either way based on existing experiences, I reckon a Zune phone, should it materialise, will go nowhere. Unless they do something really different.

Unless they get out Uncle Bill’s Business At The Speed of Thought book and actually read it and think, ‘Heck, we could actually deliver this right now.’

And that would be a sight for sore Mobile Industry Review eyes.