Andrew Tech Help

Windows 8 was publicly demoed for the first time about three weeks ago now at the D9 conference and it is still wowing people who see it and it's causing a divide throughout the tech community over whether the radical new UI is a good idea or not. I've now had that 3 weeks to think carefully about what this all means and how I would write about Windows 8 in a unique way (there's plenty of articles on the web showing demos of the new Start Screen). I had originally planned to write 2 articles, one about Windows 8 and the other one about user interface design (more specifically the Metro design), but I'm going to combine them into this one article, because I think that it's hard to talk about them separately anymore considering we know what Microsoft's plans are in the future regarding the UI for their products. It's an exciting time, but you really need to understand the key principles behind what's going on before you can truly appreciate what's going on. When I first saw what Microsoft planned to do in Windows 8, I was quite shocked, but after a while, it just clicked. I now have a good understanding of what Microsoft's strategy for the future is (and it revolves around Windows, Office, Skype & Xbox although this article will mainly focus on Windows) and I'm hoping after reading this, their strategy finally just clicks for you too.

Back in January I wrote an article titled the "Windows Phone 7 Feature Availability Matrix". This article was essentially a chart describing the feature availability in different countries around the world where Windows Phone 7 handsets are sold. That article is currently my most popular article to date with 10,000 more views than the article in 2nd place, which shows that this is a very important issue for many Windows Phone users around the world who are outside the United States. At the MIX '11 developers show this year in April, Microsoft made some announcements regarding expanding the countries where the Windows Phone Marketplace would be established as well, as new languages to support these countries in time for their 'Mango' update which was made available on the 28th of September 2011 (Australian Eastern Standard Time). So I decided to update this chart again to reflect the new feature availablity for the Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) release and have continously updated this chart all throughout this Winter (Summer in Northern Hemisphere). Now that Windows Phone 7.5 has been officially released, I now believe that this chart is at a finished (or very near finished) stage for this release. The features detailed in my two charts are what will be available in your country, if you buy a handset running Windows Phone 7.5.

Last Friday I wrote an article discussing Telstra's inaction and silence on the issue of Windows Phone 7 Updates, or more specifically the NoDo (March) update. If you wish to reread that article you can view the whole article (which includes the letter I sent to Telstra's CEO) here, but I'll recap the main points here. Microsoft released their March Update to Windows Phone (codenamed NoDo) on March 24 2011 and as of Thursday April 28th (when I wrote the letter) Telstra was still "testing" the update and instead of keeping their customers updated, they were directing their customers to an outdated update chart. Well after that letter (co-incidence or not), Telstra officially approved the update for the HTC 7 Mozart on Friday 29th April and promised to approve the LG Optimus 7Q in early May. Well today I received an offical reply from Telstra detailing some of the reasons why they took over a month to test some fairly small updates and it clears a lot of things up and even opens up some questions that Microsoft needs to answer, so I thought I'd write about that here.

It turns out, if you and a group of others can protest hard enough and communicate your message to the right people, you can achieve action. Telstra, Australia's biggest phone carrier does NOT have a good track record of releasing phone updates, especially to their line of Android Phones, but when Microsoft last year announced how they were going to architect their phone OS (in terms of strict, uniform standards) and how they would deliver the updates to customers, Windows Phone users felt a lot easier that Telstra wouldn't get in the way for them on this particular platform. Well unfortunately, that changed somewhat between the release of the phone and the time the first update was actually released on February 22nd 2011. It turned out that while Telstra wouldn't need to actually modify the phone OS or work with the manufacturer to get the update working on the phone, they would be allowed to test the update that Microsoft had created and already tested to see if would impact their network. So today (April 29th, 2011), minutes before the Royal Wedding began, Telstra tweeted that they had approved the March Update for the HTC 7 Mozart and updated their smartphone table to reflect this announcement and show that their other less popular phone (the LG Optimus 7Q) would be approved to be updated sometime in May. This whole process has involved a lot of fighting, complaining and ultimately writing to the CEO to be resolved, so let's have a look at how this whole situation panned out.