Microsoft this week denied that tablets will be based on its Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system because tablets, executives said, are really more of a PC than a phone.
That being said, the software giant also touted the concept of a "unified ecosystem" across phones, PCs, and televisions.
"A lot of people have asked me, are we going to produce a phone that is a tablet? Well, that is in conflict with this strategy. We view a tablet as a sort of PC," Andy Lees, president of the Windows Phone division at Microsoft, said during Tuesday's Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles. "We want people to be able to do the sorts of things that they expect on a PC on a tablet."
Lees promised more details on "how we can provide the [best] of the PC and the tablet" at September's Build Conference. That event will also include more details on Windows 8.
With that new OS and emerging technologies, we'll see the "bringing together of these devices into a unified ecosystem," Lees said. "We won't have an ecosystem for PCs, and an ecosystem for phones, one for tablets. They'll all come together."
Lees denied that the tablet will replace the PC; "it's additive," he said. "And that's why our strategy is that these new form factors are within a single ecosystem and not new ecosystems themselves. Windows has always spanned different PC form factors. And with Windows 8 we're going to take this to a whole new level including tablets."
So far, we've really only seen Windows 8 at this year's D9 conference. The demo, from Microsoft's president of Windows, Steven Sinofsky, showed a radically altered Windows start screen that featured user-configurable tiles. The new interface supported gestures, snap, pin, cloud apps, and new concepts like a basket for files you'll want to share between apps and services, and a hidden task bar on the right side of the screen. It was a departure from Windows 7 and drew many comparisons to the mobile Windows Phone 7 OS.
On that front, Microsoft yesterday also showed off some upcoming Windows Phone 7 devices, running Mango, including those from Samsung (right), as well as Acer, Fujitsu, and ZTE (below).
"It's very thin, and light, and that's the theme you're going to see as the processors get thinner and better battery life, as the screens get better, we're going to see phenomenal screen resolutions, great battery life, lightweight devices across the phone," said Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of Microsoft's OEM division, holding up the Samsung device.
