Windows Phone 7, Meego, Symbian 3, Google Buzz...

The announcement of Windows Phone 7 was perhaps the biggest news in the week that was. Microsoft's latest attempt at a mobile OS has been designed from the ground up to be very different from its predecessor, Windows Mobile 6.x. Where the latter was more of a business friendly OS with hooks to Outlook with a desktop Windows-like interface, Microsoft’s latest mobile OS is clearly focused on the consumer market with strong social networking hooks and a colorful interface. The downside is that the new OS is incompatible with its predecessor which means that apps which ran on Windows Mobile will not run on Windows Phone 7 until and unless they are rewritten from the ground up. While details about the new OS remain sketchy it appears that multitasking which was a prominent feature of Windows Mobile will not be present in the new OS. In many ways, Microsoft seems to be copying Apple's business model of tightly controlling application development and availability and hamstringing third-party apps. On the hardware front, Microsoft will continue to work with OEMs but it will exercise much tighter control on the device specifications with minimum standards having been set for the kind of screen, number of buttons etc. This will ensure a certain level of performance and consistency but at the expense of differentiation which could put off phone manufacturers.

For a while now, buzz has been building up about Maemo which was at one point rumored to be the successor to Symbian though Nokia has insisted that it will stick to the latter. Now Maemo and Intel's netbook OS, Moblin, are being synthesized into a new OS called Meego. It appears that Meego will be an OS for tablets, netbooks and the like. Meanwhile, Symbian 3 has been announced and it aims to offer a more consistent touchscreen UI for Symbian phones. It's still early days for this platform and as is the case with Windows Phone 7, we'll only see devices running Symbian 3 towards the end of 2010.

Google's Wave was announced with much ballyhooing and hype. It seems to have fizzled out. Now, the search giant has Buzz which appears to have started off on the wrong foot by pre-approving existing Gmail users to follow a couple of dozen people in their contact list. Worse yet, it made this list public for all to see. This led to an outcry and Google has now backtracked and stopped automatically approving followers and made privacy controls more visible. The company is now facing a class action suit. Buzz seems to have generated entirely the wrong kind of, if you’ll pardon the word, buzz for Google.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com