But when superior competition comes along, Microsoft is as vulnerable as any other outfit. Just look at what’s happened in the booming market for smartphones. Five years ago, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software ran on about one-fourth of the world’s smartphones. Today, it has fallen below 10 percent.
The company hopes to recoup those losses next year, with the release of a major upgrade, Windows Mobile 7. But for now, it’s counting on Windows Mobile 6.5, a modest improvement that came to market last month and is now available on a handful of new phones.
I’ve been running Mobile 6.5 on the Pure, a new touchscreen phone from HTC Corp. The experience isn’t altogether awful; indeed, you will probably be impressed if you have never used a smartphone before. For those who have, you will notice a few things done well and many others done wrong.
Cell carrier AT&T sells the Pure for $149.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate and with a two-year service contract. It’s a sleek gadget, its shape a compromise between the razor-sharp angles of Motorola’s new Droid phone and the luscious curves of the Apple iPhone. The Pure weighs about half an ounce less than the iPhone, but its 3.2-inch screen is markedly smaller. On the other hand, the Pure has a 5-megapixel camera, compared with 3 megapixels on the iPhone.
Like every other iPhone rival, the Pure sports too many buttons - four to the iPhone’s one. There’s also a strip just below the video screen that lets you zoom the on-screen image larger or smaller by sliding your finger back and forth. It’s there because the Pure lacks the iPhone’s superior multi-touch technology, which lets you control the screen with a pinching motion of thumb and forefinger.
Fire up the Pure, and prepare to be confused. This smartphone has not one, but two “home’’ screens. Push the button with the Windows logo, and you’ll see 21 software icons lined up in a sort of honeycomb pattern. It’s Windows Mobile’s effort to squeeze more icons onto a smaller screen. The result looks cluttered and confused next to the simplicity of the iPhone screen.
The engineers at HTC must think so, too. They have created an alternate user interface called TouchFLO3D that’s far easier on the eyes. Touching the Home icon takes you to it. At the bottom of the screen, you find a touch-sensitive bar that lets you scroll quickly through the Pure’s key features: phone calling, photos, address book, Web browser, e-mail. The Pure’s e-mail interface is particularly nice. It lets you stack up multiple accounts on one page, then flip from one to another with a finger stroke. It’s one of the better e-mail interfaces I’ve seen on a phone.
The Pure also sports Windows Mobile’s MyPhone feature, which backs up the phone’s address book and stored documents on a secure Internet site. It’s not as sophisticated as Apple’s equivalent MobileMe service, but MyPhone is free. But remember that in October, a similar service run by a Microsoft subsidiary, Danger, lost the stored records of about a million customers. Microsoft says it recovered most of the lost data, but not all of it. Feel better?
The Pure can run multiple applications simultaneously, another advantage over the iPhone. Then again, there are only about 300 Windows Mobile apps to choose from, compared with 100,000 or so for the iPhone.
Besides, the Pure has all it can handle running just one program. This is one slow smartphone. Just try surfing the Internet on its Internet Explorer browser. The Pure supports WiFi wireless networking, which is much faster than AT&T’s 3G data network, but it often took a minute or more to display a page properly. And navigating a website using my fingertips was an exercise in frustration. Even the Pure’s zoom bar for enlarging Web pages worked hesitantly, or not at all.
The sluggishness carries over to other Pure features. The address book on my BlackBerry comes to life instantly; same thing with the iPhone. On the Pure, it can take several seconds. Is a slow processor chip to blame, or Microsoft’s famously ponderous software? Either way, we’re entitled to expect better.
Microsoft saw the potential for smartphones long before Apple did, and established a strong foothold in the market. Today, it’s fading fast. Compare the Pure to the iPhone and you’ll know why.
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