The other night Mr Old Spice Guy himself, Isaiah Mustafa, gave me a run through of Windows Phone 7. Here’s what I thought of his performance.
Microsoft had been talking up Mustafa’s geek cred from the moment I walked in the room. According to the Microsoft team, the man infamous for walking around in a towel and responding to people with videos on twitter had asked them to check whether or not he’d be able to plug his Xbox directly into the hotel’s LAN port to access Xbox Live so he could play Madden online with friends back home. For the demos, they’d set up some dummy accounts, which Mustafa laughed off, happily agreeing to log in with his own account details for his showcase.
Through serendipitous good fortune, I was at the back of the room when Mustafa walked in. Like a glacier made of diamonds, the level of cool suddenly exploded in the room as he walked in (not hard, given it was full of tech and gaming journalists). Tall, athletic and smiling, Mustafa walked over to me and extended his hand in friendship, as his eyes glanced down at my name badge.
“Ah, Gizmodo”, he said, and mock lifted a pair of dumbbells, as though I were a tweet about a louffre and he was wearing only a towel. The moment passed in an instant however, as he handed me a block of Windows Phone 7 chocolate, and started showing me through the phone features.
“This is so cool”, was his catchcry as he searched through his Facebook friends to pin one to the front page. “You’ll love this, Nick – check this out”, he exclaimed as he dove into the Zune music playing app to show me the artwork resting behind the Gorillaz tracks on his phone. His minders tried to pull him away, as Mustafa flicked on the camera, “Have a look at this, the camera is great… Oh, she’s cute, let’s take a photo of her!”
The demo lasted only minutes, but Mustafa had been bang on message. Even though he was clearly there at Microsoft’s invitation, he seemed genuinely excited by the new phone – he even refused to mention his iPod when I asked him if he’d previously used a Zune.
Since giving me the one-to-one demo, Mustafa has done a range of TV and radio spots for the mobile operating system. He’s done a superb job of promoting a mobile operating system to a market who aren’t quite sure whether or not they’re prepared to let Microsoft back into their pocket. But with Mustafa’s help, Windows Phone 7 could well have become the Phone you wish your phone smelled like.
MaZ
Friday, October 22, 2010 at 12:51 PMThere is something wrong with that picture…
O I know what it is… He’s wearing a jacket.
Elly Hart
Friday, October 22, 2010 at 12:59 PMI’m so disappointed he’s wearing clothes.
Greg
Friday, October 22, 2010 at 1:06 PMThe Old Spice Guy is pretty cool.
However, the Windows Phone 7 platform is not ready for market, as it has so many features missing. Copy-Paste, multitasking, tethering to laptop, finding a hidden wireless hotspot. All those features don’t work on Windows Phone 7.
In areas where there was no Old Spice Guy, very few people turned up to buy Windows Phones (some reports say a London ‘Orange’ store sold only two on the first day).
mattm
Friday, October 22, 2010 at 1:23 PMTo be fair, ios was released without all of these features, so it can hardly be used as a benchmark.
soundman
Friday, October 22, 2010 at 1:46 PMyea rumours the there only being two phones sold on the first day are because they were only supplied with two phones at that store… don’t twists the words of what gets reported.
the fact of the matter is, MS is doing their part, manufacters and telcos on the other hand need to really feel like they can take ownership of this, otherwise they just stumble through the process like they’re doing now. this is the problem, not windows phone’s “lack” of features.
Stop pilfering forums/articles about it, MS have promised to deliver many of these as soon as they can. example is copy/paste which has been demoed to several reviewers, and will be part of the first update MS releases. An app switcher has also been rumoured. Multitasking does exist already in the system, for first-party applications which really require them, that being radio/zune. This is the exact same as iPhone 4, note that MS released these details and how they use tombstoning a week before SJ came up and called it multitasking…
matt
Friday, October 22, 2010 at 2:31 PMyeah, ios was released with out those features… like 100 years ago. and people bitched about it. they’ve since updated and fixed all those problems… before win7 was even announced.
so what the hell has MS been doing all this time?
and great, they are going to add all those features, great, maybe I’ll buy it when they’ve done that… don’t see why I should buy it now.
just like every other windows product (except maybe windows 7) wait for the first service pack…
red t-rex
Friday, October 22, 2010 at 5:35 PMSo Matt, I take it that you never buy anything as you are always waiting for features to be included that others have or you hear are coming.
Seriously “What has Microsoft been doing all this time?”. They were late to the game so for starters it will take a little while to catch up. Every little feature you include takes time and effort to create and when the ship date looms then some things get cut for the next release. Oh, and from my experience of software development, you can’t just throw more developers at the problem to deliver as it usually intoduces more problems than it solves.
This isn’t lame, it’s normal incremental product development. They will have learned that copy and paste is a “nice to have” feature from Apples delivery. Sure it’s annoying not to have it but as was demonstrated by the iPhone, hardly a deal breaker. It didn’t stop the iphone selling by the bucket load.
Why didn’t apple include a camera in the first iPad? Cameras are as cheap as chips and they include them in almost every other Apple product! If every manufacturer waited until they had a fully featured product (yes, even Apple) then they would never deliver anything.
Despite all the impressive independent reviews you fall back to the good ol’ “wait for the 1st service pack” line. That truly shows your ignorance.
Chris Guerin
Friday, October 22, 2010 at 1:29 PMNick you lucky bastard!
Did you receive the traditional greeting;
“Look to your phone, now back to me, now back to your phone, now back to me. Sadly your phone is not me. But if you switched to Windows 7 Mobile your phone could be like me.”
Joel
Friday, October 22, 2010 at 1:34 PMJust to clarify Nick..
“The moment passed in an instant however, as he handed me a block of Windows Phone 7 chocolate, and started showing me through the phone features.”
Now did he show you the features on a real WP7 or on the block of chocolate?
/sarcasm for those that don’t realise
joe
Friday, October 22, 2010 at 2:20 PMNick you are cute!
Seamus Byrne
Friday, October 22, 2010 at 6:01 PMSorry, Nick’s the one on the right.
oleary
Friday, October 22, 2010 at 4:00 PMI want to meet this guy. I bet that whatever you threw at him conversationally, he’d have EXACTLY the right answer. Like, if you insulted him, he’d respond in a way that was incredibly polite and made you feel small.
Man. So cool.
enndee
Friday, October 22, 2010 at 6:16 PMhe’s not on a horse.
Bima
Saturday, October 23, 2010 at 12:58 AMWow some people are like drones! they’re still moping about copy/paste. Dudes, it’s coming in future update, what’s wrong with you?!
Daniel Weaver-Koenigs
Saturday, October 23, 2010 at 10:11 PMMy local Optus and Vodafone stores have no stock, no demo units.
My local Telstra store has some stock, most of the shipment delayed apparently, and will be waiting a few weeks for approval to set up a demo unit.
Pretty piss poor launch effort really, I’m really excited about this phone, but if geeks like me wont buy it without being able to at least play with a demo unit, how are they going to get the general populace on the platform with no demo’s and no geek friends buying them to show them?
Seriously windows phone 7 has launched and I can’t tell the difference between now and pre-launch.