The Battle Continues: Windows 7 Phone Vs Apple iPhone 4

May 20, 2011

Recently Microsoft’s CEO Steve Balmer officially unveiled its new Windows Phone 7 operating system for mobile devices, along with nine smartphones by various manufacturers that will carry the software upon its release.

Together with Android devices, smartphones running Windows Phone 7 will be one of the biggest competitors to the iPhone 4 running iOS, so can Microsoft  capture the market from Apple’s already massively popular iPhone?

In a twist on the monster metaphor, the competition is not between beauty and beast. Windows Phone 7 has a very elegant user interface that is nearly as beautiful and intuitive as what Apple produces. The competition is really between capabilities, of which the iPhone has many and Windows Phone 7 has fewer.

Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 OS has some difficulties to overcome. The OS lacks such functionality as copy/paste and multitasking–features that rivals like Apple took their time to implement but now do have on the market. Like iOS, the Windows Phone 7 devices lack Adobe Flash support; and in contrast to most Android smartphones on Verizon, they can’t act as a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Moreover Windows Phone 7 doesn’t support HTML5-based websites, the Adobe Flash Player, device-wide search, multitasking, copy and paste, or on-device encryption. The iPhone 4 — specifically iOS 4.1 — supports all but Flash; the iPad supports all but Flash and multitasking, but will gain multitasking when iOS 4.2 ships this month.

Applications will be another challenge for Microsoft, as developers have yet to rush to create apps for the platform. In comparison, Apple has over 270,000 apps, and Android over 100,000, so Microsoft has some catching up to do in this department.

The comparison chart below compares the iPhone 4 to the nine Windows Phone 7 launch devices:

iPhone 4 with iOS Win7 Mobile Smartphones
Processor: Apple A4 Chip (1GHz) 1GHz and up
RAM: 512MB 512MB
Internal Storage: 16GB or 32GB 8GB-16GB
Camera & Video: 5MP with 720p recording 5MP-8MP with 720p recording
Screen: 960×640 Retina display WVGA-480×800 super AMOLED
Battery Life: 7hrs talk-time300hrs standby Up to 7hrs talk-time

Up to 456hrs standby
Video Calling: ✔ ✔
GPS: ✔ ✔
Physical Keyboard: ✖ Available on selected devices
Accelerometer: ✔ ✔
Gyroscope: ✔ ✖

But in this day and age of mature, aggressive mobile contenders such as Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, it’s hard to believe Microsoft’s omission of these capabilities will be forgiven by most users.So lets see who wins!

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Written by Jo & Ray · Filed Under Entertainment, Gadgets, Technology 

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