Windows Phone & Gaming

At BAND last night I had some interesting discussions about Windows Phone and as Daniel showed me the racing game on the Zune it suddenly hit me. Windows Phone is not going to be a iPhone killer, at least not based on a single feature that will blast the iPhone away. It is going to blast a hole in the Nintendo DS and Playstation Portable market.

Everything I’ve seen so far about Windows Phone makes it equal to the iPhone as a phone, but the focus on XNA and XBox Live integration will make it that everyone that has an XBox is going to want to have one… It’ll be interesting to see if my hunch is right. It took me a while to figure it out, since my view of the Windows Phone has been influenced by me thinking about ‘enterprise’ applications and how Windows Phone fits in there.

At the Augusta MSDN Roadshow event 2 weeks ago Chris Bowen showed a device and he didn’t show any details about what the Office/email/Outlook experience looked like on the phone. Considering it will still be a while before the devices hit the market makes me believe that a lot of development is still going on in that area and that Microsoft will have some surprises in store for us. I expect the Phone 7 offering to be well beyond what a Blackberry offers. Time will tell.

The hardware specs for Windows Phone 7 require manufacturers to provide at least 8GB of memory. My wish is that these phones will have at least 64GB of memory. That way I can put all my media (music, pictures, movies) and office files on my phone and not have to lug around a USB stick anymore, plus with Office on the phone I’ll be able to actually use the files. Perhaps WP7 will allow me to do a remote desktop session into my phone?

Can’t wait to get one of these phones!