Page II: After years of working to crack the handheld and mobile phone market, Microsoft is counting on Ya-Qin Zhang to help build products that will finally appeal to the masses.
When you look out two to three years, will there still be a distinction between handhelds and mobile phones?
If you look at the hardware, you are going to see probably half a gigahertz- to 1GHz-embedded processors. That is very powerful. Moore's Law continues -- but obviously with constraints.
The constraint is battery power, which is not progressing at a rate beyond 10 percent. The processing power, the storage and the communications bandwidth are going to continue to follow Moore's Law. The more exciting part is really the software and the connectivity.
I don't know if it's exactly two years or three years, but let's say in the foreseeable future that we will have seamless mobile computing. The first thing is really seamless connectivity, really making the transition from a single radio to multiple radios. It could be Wi-Fi, BlueTooth, WiMax, UWB (ultra wideband) and also other cellular radios. The important thing is to make sure that there is seamless roaming and handover and a consistent experience. That is a critical technology that we need to enable.
When do we get to the point where the device can move between these networks without users having to manually change the settings?
In our next release, we will be able to do Wi-Fi and GPRS (General Packet Radio Services). For seamless connectivity roaming on all those radios, it is going to take many years. It is going to be an evolutionary process.
You mention that some of these capabilities are going to come in the next version of Windows CE. Microsoft offered a technology preview of Windows CE 5.0. When are we going to see that come into products?
There are two things. One is CE 5.0 we are going to release in the summer. The other is (the next versions of) Pocket PC and Windows Mobile we are going to release sometime next year. I cannot give you any details right now. Seamless roaming is a key part of that, but roaming is by no means complete. You can only roam between two different radios.
When you look at Windows Mobile today, what are the biggest priorities, and where are the areas where you see the biggest need for improvement?
The whole smart phone platform -- the industry is still in a very early stage. If you look at Windows Mobile, our primary priority is to optimise the experience for what we call mobile information workers.
There is a lot of technology there already. We can make a lot of improvements in working better together with the PC and the server. I'm not just talking Windows Mobile but the whole smart-phone category. There are lots of exciting features and technologies in the PC that have not been delivered by the phones yet.
Obviously, there are technical challenges, because the smart phone is very constrained. It's constrained by the real estate, the battery power, the footprint, the screen size and the way you interact with it -- you don't have a huge keyboard.
A smart phone has to make phone calls in a way that is transparent to users. It should be transparent to users. Usability: I think we have a very nice user interface, but when you put in a lot of features, you want to create a very easy-to-navigate experience. I think that we can improve in all of these things. The features are there, but we need more.
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