Game on
As we said in our MWC 2010 preview, Microsoft was under immense pressure to deliver a killer announcement at the show, with Apple and Google threatening to pull so far ahead of it in the mobile space that there would otherwise be too much ground to make up.
We expected Microsoft to launch Windows Phone 7 today, and it did, but we feared it would be just an evolution of what's currently on offer. For it to deliver what Microsoft needs, we thought it needed to be fast, do a much better job of integrating all the various products Microsoft has, and needed to raise some eyebrows. On first impressions, it has ticked all of those boxes.
The only negative was how over-subscribed the event was. We turned up a full hour before the start but were still one of the first of an army of people to be told the auditorium was full. The same happened at the Intel/Nokia event earlier and the feeling is that this is easily the most attended MWC in recent memory.
So we were forced to go to a Microsoft suite and watch the presentation on a screen, sat on the floor. As you can see from the image below, we were in good company.
