Should you care about Windows Phone 7?

Windows Phone 7 may not be available yet, but it is a great talking point. Following the collapsing market share of Window Mobile and the Kin debacle, will Microsoft be able to claw its way back into the SmartPhone market? With mobile apps increasingly important in both the consumer and business world, what would be the consequences of failure?

The strategic importance of the platform makes it interesting even if you think that there is little room for Microsoft's phone in a market dominated at the high end by the two As: Apple and Android.

There is even fierce competition among the also-rans, with Nokia pitching Symbian 3 and Maemo/Meego, and HP presumably about to do something with Palm WebOS. And what about Samsung's bada? There will be blood on the carpet; not all these operating systems will survive - and while that will be a shame from the point of view of diversity, it will be a relief to developers attempting to support the broadest number of devices.

So why even bother with Windows Phone 7? Well, there are a couple of obvious reasons. One is the possibility that Microsoft will deliver an excellent and delightful device. Likely? Past form says no; but the company knows what it is up against so you never know; early reviews of preview devices have been generally favourable.

The second reason is less speculative, which is the way Windows Phone 7 fits in with the rest of Microsoft's platform. If you are used to coding in Visual Studio with C#, then creating apps for Microsoft's new phone will be less challenging than doing so for iPhone or Android. A Windows Phone 7 app is essentially a .NET and Silverlight app, or for games XNA, and from what I have seen so far Microsoft has done a good job with the emulator and developer tools.

The disconnect here is that Microsoft's primary target for Windows Phone 7 is the consumer, whereas those armies of Visual Studio developers are largely building corporate apps. Some of them are also annoyed that Microsoft is not providing compatibility with existing Windows Mobile applications.

There are also significant limitations in Windows Phone 7 in its first release. There's no multi-tasking, which means you have to write code to handle your application being shut down and re-activated while giving the appearance of resuming where the user left off. There's no native code, which runs contrary to the instinct of experienced mobile developers, some of whome tried and failed to wrest acceptable performance from the Compact Framework, the mobile .NET Framework from pre-Silverlight days. There's no copy and paste - which does not seem a big deal to me, but some people seem to care a lot about this. Another annoyance is that all apps must be deployed throught Microsoft's Apple-style Marketplace, though I hope and expect that Microsoft will come up with a way round this for corporate roll-outs.

Future iterations of Windows Phone could remove these limitations, but in this instance Microsoft does not have time to release something not very good and get it right three versions later.

I'm keen to hear from developers who have tried the preview devices or the SDK. Like what you see? Intend to support it? I look forward to comments, because the success or failure of this product is going to be significant.