Yesterday I attended Microsoft’s “Xmas in July” event in the Saatchi Gallery in central London in which many of Microsoft’s consumer products were being demoed. I went to the event with my brother so that I could get a purely consumer perspective on what Microsoft had to show.
First off my brother and I entered the gallery and were taken past some very large Microsoft branded boards into a large, atmospheric room with free food and drink and two large Windows Phone 7 screens. Obviously I was drawn to the screens and we were promptly given a demo by the marketer of what Windows Phone 7 will be able to do. My brother was very impressed saying that the OS Q”is like other smart phones but featuring the very best bits” and even “feels more personal than other phones”. He is an iPhone user and I asked him if he would consider a Windows Phone 7 device as his next phone, he said yes.
Next up we were given a guided tour of the various rooms Microsoft had set up to showcase their products, the first room was for Windows, Windows Live and Office. The room was full of new all-in-one PCs and notebooks, all looked stunning. I wasn’t too interested in the new version of Office after having used it for months now but my brother was impressed with some of the new image editing features and the Office Web Apps. After that we had a look at Windows 7 and its media playback capabilities with Sky Player and MSN Video Player both built into Windows Media Center. Following Windows 7 was a demo of Windows Live, specifically Messenger and Photo Gallery in which the new social features with Facebook were demoed in Messenger and Photo Fuse were demoed in Photo Gallery.
Following the previous day’s announcement by Microsoft that Windows Phone 7 will automatically upload photos to SkyDrive I thought I should ask if Windows Live Sync will feature on Windows Phone 7. It won’t. The reason for Windows Phone 7 to not feature Windows Live Sync at the current time is because people use Sync to keep whole folders updated across PCs, its unlikely all the content of these folders is required on a mobile device and will in fact be too large for the device and would be too much of a demand on the networks. However, its obviously possible to access photos from social networks, Office documents from the cloud, etc from the respective hubs on the mobile OS. The representative who I was speaking too said that perhaps in the future Windows Live Sync would feature on Windows Phone 7 but at this point in time there will be unbranded mechanisms for uploading content to SkyDrive. This I find encouraging that Microsoft know how Sync is likely to be used from things such as Live Mesh and so perhaps will have an excellent implementation of Sync for mobile devices in the future that is kind on storage and networks.
In the same room as all the Windows PCs and the various pieces of software being demoed was a sushi-like bar with various accessories from Microsoft Hardware rotating around it. There was much of real interesting on the table, however I did find the Microsoft Arc keyboard to be smaller than I expected and looked very nice.
The next room my brother and I went into was a gaming room, we were shown a demo of Fable III and were able later to play on it. Not owning an Xbox myself (but I really want one) or ever having played Fable II I am sure a lot of what I was told went straight over my head, but I enjoyed the little piece of the game I was able to play. At the other end of the room was a big area dedicated to a game you might have heard of, Halo Reach. Unfortunately there was very little to do other than watch a video of the game, it does look good.
Out of this game room we went and into the room I had been waiting for, the Kinect room. We were shown how to play the various games on Kinect with the first being bowling. I scored very poorly on Bowling, that might have more to do with me being poor at it in the physical world as opposed to any problems with Kinect though, and I didn’t appear to be much better at the mine cart, dodging game on Kinect Adventures. However, my fortunes improved when playing Kinect Joy Ride where I came a more respectable 5th (out of 8). From there I went on to beat my brother in the hurdles game coming 1st, I was very surprised at that, he is much more athletic than I am.
I was already sold on the idea of Kinect and its top of my Christmas list, but there is something really quite magical (eww, sounds very Apple-y) abut controlling actions on a screen with no physical contact of any kind with something. I am really looking forward to having this at home and if you get a chance to play with Kinect then do, you wont regret it.
Here’s my brother playing Joy Ride.
A few people I spoke to at the event about their experience with Kinect said they thought there were some serious problems with latency. I, however, didn’t find there to be much of a problem with latency, what I did find though was that it was easy for Kinect to get confused if there was someone in the periphery of its detection area. Oddly, it could easily handle two people standing in front of it just not if there was someone half in its field of view, I just hope everyone has large enough living rooms for this accessory.
After playing with Kinect my brother and I returned to some of the other rooms to check out a few more things and have a few more plays on Kinect; Joy Ride is a great game. After this we grabbed some food and shortly after left, as we did we were presented with a gift from Microsoft. The gift was Christmas stocking, fitting for the title of the event, with a Christmas cracker, small Christmas cake, Santa Claus hat and a memory stick with information about all the products. Its a great gift for the Microsoft fan that I am and I will be sure to use the stocking on December 24th.
It was a great day and I came away feeling that very confident that Microsoft are looking to have a very good Christmas period indeed.
