That's a lot. Or not.
Pocket-Lint’s Stuart Miles reports that some sleuthing shows there are over 8,000 prototype Windows Phone 7 phones now in the field.
Whether you think that’s good, great, pathetic, or risable depends a lot on your perspective.
Miles notes that the number is slightly above the number of Kin phones that Microsoft sold before it abruptly canceled that ill-fated product, just a few weeks after it was introduced; but of course slightly less than the approximately 59 million iPhones Apple has shipped in three years.
Miles finds the number of Windows Phone 7 phones (that phrase is going to become soooo tiresome) “interesting”:
“… it’s interesting to see that Microsoft isn’t messing about here getting devices out to developers…”
“…very interesting to see that the number of users has more than doubled in just 2 weeks.”
“Microsoft is clearly serious about making sure this launch is going to be a huge success.”
Personally, I think this has been pretty clear for months. [See “Microsoft’s mobile shakeup: Will it unleash Windows Phone?”]
Whether Windows Phone 7 will be any kind of success remains to be seen. The redesigned user interface seems to be winning more converts, and more enthusiasm, the longer developers work with it. Partly because Microsoft really does seem to have left behind a PC mindset in focusing on the mobile user’s “experience.”
And so far Microsoft has been focusing its primary effort, or its primary visible effort, on the Windows developer community, encompassing developers with experience in Windows Mobile, Visual Studio, Silverlight, Expression Blend, and for games, XNA Studio. The attention to high quality mobile development tools, leveraging existing skills, has the potential to create some powerful as well as dramatic mobile applications for Windows Phone.
In a sense, the potential weak point is the actual handset that phone makers will deliver. Microsoft worked closely with several of them to craft a base hardware standard for Windows Phone — all of them will have at least the specified processor capabilities, memory etc, to ensure a highly effective implementation.
But beyond that hardware foundation, is something that Microsoft, unlike Apple, can’t control: the “magic” that makes any given device really worth having. This Fall, all of Microsoft’s own work, and its future as a mobile platform vendor, hinges on whether the handset designers and manufacturers are as enthusiastic about the potential of Windows Phone 7 as the 8,000 now using these same manufacturers’ prototypes.
