I’m talk­ing about Win­dows Mobile 7 (WinMo 7). As many of you know, I have been eye­balling Apple com­put­ers and Google Android-powered mobile phones. How­ever, my haunted Zune issues notwith­stand­ing, I am still will­ing to give Microsoft a shot in the per­sonal com­puter, per­sonal music player and mobile phone are­nas. I upgraded my Toshiba lap­top with Win­dows 7 about a month ago and have been impressed with the improve­ments in sys­tem per­for­mance and sta­bil­ity. If these improve­ments carry over to WinMo 7, there’s rea­son to be encouraged.

Fairly recently, I decided to hold off on pur­chas­ing the Zune HD because there were rumors float­ing around that Microsoft was finally going to release WinMo 7. Microsoft put out a WinMo 6.5 a few months ago that, by all accounts, appears to be just a Band-Aid to add some fea­tures and attempt to keep up with the exponentially-changing mobile OS land­scape. Just yes­ter­day, Sam­sung announced a new device call Wave, run­ning on a new mobile OS plat­form called Bada.  (Don’t hate me. I didn’t make up the stu­pid name.)

Those famil­iar with me, know I am huge fan of clean design, and smooth fonts. I’ve got to say, the user inter­face (UI) looks is pretty!

 

Here’s a video first look at Win­dows Mobile 7, pre­sented at the Mobile World Con­gress in Barcelona.

If you really want to get your nerd on about Win­dows Mobile 7, check out this 22-minute video from Microsoft’s Chan­nel 9 site.

It must be said that this Win­dows Mobile OS update is way over­due. A good num­ber even ques­tion whether this OS upgrade is too lit­tle, too late for Microsoft. A good ques­tion. The answer, I think, remains to be seen. The pro­lif­er­a­tion of iPhones and iPods, and now Android OS run devices such as the Nexus One, Droid, Hero, Eris, etc. make it a tough smart­phone hill to climb. (A hill Microsoft used to dom­i­nate, no less.) And, unfor­tu­nately, it will be some time before con­sumers get their hands on any WinMo 7-powered devices. Accord­ing to the infor­ma­tion released from Microsoft, WinMo 7 devices won’t be avail­able until “Hol­i­day 2010.” We could all hope that means one of the var­i­ous national hol­i­days between now and the end of the year, but I think we all know it prob­a­bly means some­time between Thanks­giv­ing and Christ­mas. That’s a shame. It makes me won­der whether Win­dows has really fin­ished the OS, and it’s just dan­gling some sexy teasers out in front us. As the expres­sion goes, time will tell. 

As for me? As much as my inter­est is piqued, par­tic­u­larly with the inte­gra­tion of Zune fea­tures with the phone, I am prob­a­bly not will­ing to wait that long. Other than the Zune subscription-based music, most of the songs I have are MP3s, which can be played on any device. I am much less inter­ested in the inter­face itself (iTunes, Zune Mar­ket­place), and sim­ply would like a device where I can suc­cess­fully inte­grate my needs — phone, e-mail, cal­en­dar, decent cam­era and music. I rely pretty heav­ily on Google appli­ca­tions for e-mail, cal­en­dar and even doc­u­ments, so the Android phones look­ing more and more attractive.

If you have expe­ri­ence and a pref­er­ence for one of the Mobile OS plat­forms, let me know. I am par­tic­u­larly inter­ested to hear impres­sions from peo­ple using Win­dows Mobile devices, as well as those who have moved from an iPhone, WinMo or Black­Berry to an Android or WebOS (Palm) device.