Windows Phone 8: Great, But Still Too Late?

Microsoft's Windows Phone division is like a powerful sportscar that goes from 0-60 in five minutes. It's accelerating - you can see it's doing so - but as its engine strains to get into gear, its more nimble competitors are lapping it.

All the same, it is accelerating. Windows Phone 7 was a mind-blowing 2008 product released in 2010. Now Windows Phone 8 looks like a great 2011 operating system coming out in late 2012. That's bringing the gap between Microsoft and technology leadership down from two years to one. At this rate, if there's still room in the market for Windows Phone 9 in 2013, it should dazzle.

The twin leaks this week about Windows Phone 8, aka "Apollo," run down the wish list mobile-industry observers have had for the OS for ages now. Multiple chipset support? Yep. Multiple screen resolutions? You bet. Better syncing, sans Zune client? Uh-huh. Merging the kernel with Windows 8? Wow.

Windows Phone 8 looks like it'll continue Microsoft's trend of merging its phone platform with Windows and the Xbox. That's smart. People love their XBoxes. And whether or not they love them, most people with PCs have a Windows PC.

The problem is, we're unlikely to hear much about Windows Phone 8 officially until midyear, because otherwise it will "Osborne" products like the Nokia Lumia 900, which isn't even on the market yet.

What We'll See at MWCInstead, at Mobile World Congress next month we'll get a bunch of lower-key announcements: probably the "Tango" Windows Phone 7.6 release, which will enable lower-cost devices, hopefully some more CDMA Windows Phones to bring the platform back to Verizon and Sprint, and definitely a version of Skype for Windows Phone.

This is all good. The problem is, Windows Phone needs something big to move a sales needle that has stayed resolutely stuck near zero. Windows Phone has gotten generally good reviews, and it has more than 50,000 apps, a decent collection. But it's achieved little traction in the U.S. market.

Some of that, for sure, comes from an inadequate array of CDMA phones. If you can't support Sprint and Verizon, you're unlikely to take off here. Sprint exec David Owens sounded positively annoyed at CES about the lack of decent CDMA Windows Phone options for him to sell.

But a lot of the OS's problem comes from the lack of wow-factor devices. Windows Phone is still locked to slower processors and lower-resolution screens than cutting-edge smartphones have, and the halo effect from those cutting-edge devices tends to help sales of midrange devices. Windows Phone 8 could enable OEMs to break through that barrier.

The Nokia Lumia 900 is the closest Windows Phone will come to a flagship over the next few months, and even that handsome, well-built phone is out-specced in various ways by current Android and Apple devices with their super-fast processors and Retina Displays. Specs matter because it's hard to sell user experience on an advertisement; the specs get people in the door.

Nokia and Microsoft both say their pace of change is accelerating. I agree with Microsoft's Greg Sullivan when he says there's still room for another OS. But Apollo is what Windows Phone needs now. Can Microsoft hook up some nitrous to its engine and get Windows Phone 8 to us this summer? I certainly hope so.