Gadgetory

hi I'm plywood average and i'm joined today by joe belfiore for microsoft controller to join us Joe well here at CES in Las Vegas CS when it off how's the shopping for you it's great so far we're excited at Microsoft with a broad range of stuff but for me windows phone the nokia lumia 900 is exciting it's a big day does it have that for you to Lumia 900 what about the HD Titan to you how do you feel about that's pretty exciting too but you know for me yesterday being part of the Nokia announcement getting that device out there spending time with those guys it's definitely meaningful there a key partner for us we're excited about the Titan to generally lots of good stuff happening here cool well we we had heard that you guys would come out with some OT windows phones you've done that with HTC and with Nokia any other windows phones that we can look forward to with LTE well right now what we're talking about so far and what the announcements have been at CES have been the two new phones though as I said the one from Nokia and then the one from HTC so so far no additional phones that we're talking about so far well there's another big mobile event specifically mobile event mwc coming up and the Lumia 900 quite a few folks would have been disappointed to see that it's a AT&T exclusive so its Us exclusive can we look forward to similar devices in Europe um you know I that's a good question for nokia i think what they would say is that to the extent that people are excited about that device you know they're going to look at expanding their lineup over time but right now the Lumia 900 really was built for the American market it's designed for LTE for 80's bands they're entering into a significant partnership with AT&T so whatever happens in the future we'll have to see but I hope it is true that people are excited enough by that phone but they wanted a bunch of other countries and let no key gets that feat oh yeah I mean I just today I got a chance to play around with it and I do like it very much myself I I got to review the nokia n9 and the lumia 800 which was knock its first witness form and the 900 is kind of very much like a scaled-up 800 which kind of a good thing it's pretty good thing but you know you do have to note the fact that it has wvga resolution 800 x 480 which is starting to lag the competition can you tell us anything about what Microsoft is planning on that front yeah it's interesting um I think if you look at how we built our team and the program on windows phone we've really tried to focus our engineering efforts on a relatively narrow set of hardware so that we can optimize it greatly and if you look at the chipsets for example we're on qualcomm chipsets the snapdragon chipset if you look at the screen resolution by focusing on a narrower set of things initially we think we can drive performance up battery life up and help ISVs go get their apps done so if you think about Windows Phone and sort of its we're barely out of our first year and we're trying to bootstrap this new high quality experience the approach that we've chosen to take is to focus on a narrower set of things you take the the you pick the screen resolution as an example now what I would say is for most consumers walking into a store or even forget walking to store carrying a phone around as their phone for two years on contract that that resolution looks very good and the you take the any of these phones really taking any phones with the technology they have for applying great contrast and making colors pop out the screens look really nice now that's not to say that you can't incrementally improve how things look by increasing resolution you can but it does come at the cost of some battery life you have to put a stronger processor in to drive all those pixels and the trade-off that we've made so far is in the combination of battery smooth buttery animations and performance cost to focus their over time I think you can expect to see us expand the breadth of the kinds of things we're doing but right now we think it makes it over time is a very wide range they will be trying to get with guys here at CES to contract the overtime because when they say we introduces something this year would basically the beginning of January yeah that doesn't really give us much of all the good and bad news for you is we're talking at CES about the things that were announced now and they're coming really soon we'll have other announcements other things to talk about for later in the year but right now we're excited about the lineup weekend well something that you selfish and is cost where do you see Windows Phone fitting in in terms of the competition I think it's fair to say that Android and iOS are the biggest competitors and they both have very specific strategies they're all approaches to the market iOS must keep it very narrow with one hero device and Android wants to keep it it's versatile and as diverse as possible so how does windows phone stand out how do you you know how do you tempt somebody away from the iOS and Android ecosystem yeah I think that there are a number of different things that we're thinking about in that regard one is in terms of the value proposition that we want to create for end-users we started on Windows Phone looked at the iphone we looked at Android was emerging at the time and we said what are the characteristics of this and what is it good at delivering iphone at the time was very focused on apps good touch experience good at web browsing and we felt like we could do a lot by focusing on human connections deeply integrating social networking bringing people to the forefront and trying to do that with a visual appearance that's unique and yet differentiated no i'd say the plan but it's just you know you're different and unique and in my personal opinion the things that you've done a very good but you know when the person walks into a store is the price point going to be something yeah that you push well where i was going is I think there's sort of two dimensions here that are interesting one is what's the design and feature set and what I'd say for us is we have a unique visual design and we offer a feature set that focuses around people it's good at apps and in fact it tries to integrate applications into the experience but it tries to really make your human connections work well but then there's a separate sort of track of what's the program and you characterize the iOS program it's apples you know relatively narrow set of devices and their their ecosystem that Android is very broad one we're trying to use a methodology that balances those things we want to get the kind of predictable quality that people generally expect on iOS because it's controlled but with more variation than you would get only going with one they're doing deeply integrated hardware and software and so unlike Android I would say we're with open source there's the benefit of someone will take that source and they'll engineer the craziest device you can think of and it'll happen really fast that's that's what open source enables we will be slower for those kinds of you know crazy or speculative things to happen but are the trade-off that we're aiming for is higher quality and value in a way it's a it's a little bit of a less edgy early adopter approach it's more of a broad mainstream approach where we focus on predictability really high quality you know ranging from how good are the phone calls to the battery life to the stutter enos of the user experience to being able to count on all the apps running and so that's how we we think about those two things you know a unique design and then a program that balances aggressiveness and speed with predictable quality okay that's a very comprehensive answer is sorry I appreciate but again hey I mean I I want to sit with the price point for just one more question which is to ask would you look to match android devices I mean what you just said is you're not looking to fight a spec war with Android which is fair enough right you look into the differentiator on a different way but would you look to match android devices installs a price point so would you look to undercut them um i think i think in general matching on price point is the right way to think about it we have a cost structure and windows phone has a cost structure that's different than android you know android for a device vendor to bring it to market typically requires more engineering investment to do work to fill it out we think we require less engineering vestments so we're less expensive in that way we think we have a license that's different than Android there's no license for Android so the cost structure is really are different now in terms of supported hardware um because Android has the open source model they can span very wide and so OEMs do make decisions to drive prices down that in our opinion compromise the user experience in ways that are particularly unfortunate because they're not detectable by the end user so I'll give you a good example we have a lot of debate our team about whether today we require four point symmetric multi-touch which means you can detect multiple fingers there are a lot of Android phones that ship with just two point symmetric multi-touch you can shave some cost off the phone by doing that the problem is some games won't work right and as an end user going into a store you have no way of knowing really whether the phone you're getting has the better controller the less one so we are going to make decisions that in the service of quality probably keep us above androids lowest price point but I think as a practical matter the low price points that people are looking for will get into those price bands but Android will always be able to go a little lower than we can show you also mentioned the standardization in terms of hardware but recently st-ericsson announced that in partnership with Nokia their worship or Windows Phone device with st-ericsson with an SD ericsson chipset inside and how would that affect things would we do you have any significant info well we we haven't commented specifically on other companies doing chipsets but if you take that as a hypothetical example over time it's certainly our intent to broaden the ecosystem of hardware that's supported by windows phone and if you go sort of look at where we're at in our life cycle as I said I think we're we're in the phase now where we've got a pretty good value proposition we're building out the number of apps we're starting to increase the breadth of phones getting a wider range of chipsets will make sense and it's something I expect will do but we don't have any announcements about show yet so let me just now that there's actually switch over to discuss the upcoming windows phone so we know windows phone with no windows phone 7.5 but we've also heard by Windows Phone tango and we've heard about Windows Phone and Paolo can you tell us anything about tank oh no no very well because we re we've heard about tango region irit to make Windows Phone compatible with 256 megabytes of RAM anything you can tell us about that sorry no a roadmap for tango to nothing to do I think tango is a cool sounding word is a cool 71 Apollo it ends in oh ok you killing me ok welcome to look forward to with mwc ah you know it's too early to say i think if you look generally at what we're doing i can say that the team certainly is busy doing a whole lot of interesting work and i know that i know that all of you watching this and you guys would love to hear more specifics but unfortunately i just can't talk about those yet we're trying to make sure that we focus on the exciting announcements that we have today solve the problems and and then announce stuff when it's ready as oh and just wrap up Wilco and Lee's mentioned last year that Microsoft had a vision of one ecosystem which includes windows 8 includes windows phone and Xbox and all of those things how are you guys going about making that happen yeah I actually I'm I'm really excited about 2012 from the perspective of windows 8 coming to market and there's a lot of things that already a line between the windows 8 plans we've announced in the Windows Phone product that we have now if you look at the general user experience of Live Tiles there's obviously some good alignment there if you look at the app platform for windows 8 the app platform for Windows 8 is a combination of ways that developers can write apps and one of those the methodology of writing in silverlight or zamel and c-sharp is highly similar between what Windows 8 is is going to be doing and what exists today on the phone so as a developer will be really easy for you to use a similar or the same tool set similar the same language and API access so we think that's going to help a lot in terms of developers coming to Microsoft learning the tools learning languages and then be able to target both platforms ok so you I mean it's kind of evident that you've tried to have a consistent look to the interface where to start UI and what you're saying is that basically you tryin give consistent tools to developers yeah absolutely and I think that you know certainly we will do new revisions of the product which we're just not talking about yet you can expect to see other things what about apps will have apps that are consistent across all free device platforms I mean if you mean in terms of we'll developers go and try to take advantage of the similarity and platforms to write software that interacts across both I'd say it's highly likely they will although you know right now it's early days certainly for windows 8 in terms of getting developers going and we haven't shown that many apps or talk to that much in specific about what developers will be doing but I think I think it's right to assume that developers will look at this very similar platform in its user experience and some similarity in the way you go about writing the code and take advantage of that fact certainly from a Microsoft perspective as well I think next fall we will talk about windows 8 and windows phone as family products and I think that'll also you know create more of a momentum around people doing work that crosses both okay Joe thank you very much yeah sex good to see any shit