Hardware | Jonathan Rothwell

His letter to the Board and the “Apple community”:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

Whether this resignation has been brought about by recurring health issues, a desire to spend more time with his family, or new obligations as Batman, this will have a negative effect on Apple’s valuation.

I’d argue this is unwarranted. While Tim Cook, Jobs’s replacement, lacks his showmanship and has a mildly strange voice, he clearly knows what he’s doing. Jobs made a mistake in appointing John Sculley to Apple in the 80s: I am highly sceptical that he would make a similar mistake again.

Like his business tactics or hate them, one cannot deny that Mr Jobs, along with Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates, are true visionaries and pioneers of our time. Given the exciting transitions the industry is going through towards a “post-PC” (or “PC-plus”) dominated consumer market, Apple is in an extremely strong position. The fact Jobs will still have an advisory role for the foreseeable future only bolsters the fact that Apple, as a company, will remain a prominent part of the industry’s landscape for many years to come.

(Image: Tom Coates)

Here’s a (not very good) picture of my new mobile phone, an HTC 7 Mozart with Windows Phone 7, purchased on Friday on a contract with O2.

It says hello.

And now follows a speedily-collected and horribly inarticulate coalescence of my thoughts on the phone, and Windows Phone 7.

The Mozart is essentially a HTC Desire with a slightly better camera, a different bodyshell and slightly unusual styling, and running Windows Phone 7 (and hence having the mandated three buttons below the screen, in an unusually non-irritating capacitative form.) It’s extremely well-built, with a unibody shell that feels nice and evenly weighted. The volume rocker is a bit too flush against the body for my liking, but the sleep/wake button and the camera shutter control are fine.

Rather more excitingly, there’s a little LED that sits behind the speaker grille. When the phone is plugged in to charge, the LED lights up red, turning green when the battery is full. When the battery is low, it’ll flash red impetuously.

While we’re on the topic of the battery, battery life isn’t outstanding, but it’s perfectly adequate. You’ll definitely need to charge it nightly, though, and it might be wise to turn off Wi-Fi when you’re not going to be using it.

The most important aspect of this phone is Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, which, astonishingly for a product from the company that gave us the abysmal Windows Mobile 6.5, is brilliant. The UI is a triumph, in many ways surpassing that used by the iOS. It feels fast and fluid, and it’s no wonder Microsoft intends to apply this to tablets in the upcoming Windows 8.

Of course, in terms of feature parity, Microsoft is far, far behind the iOS. You can’t have custom ringtones right now, for example, and the version of Internet Explorer running on it has a rendering engine that’s somewhere between IE7 and IE8 (and hence produces the results you’d expect out of a version of IE produced before Microsoft’s standards epiphany with IE9.)

More irritating is the lack of multitasking. Many apps could benefit enormously from this, as, right now, an inadvertent touch in RunKeeper will switch to Bing or the start screen, meaning you have to go through the rigmarole of restarting the app and resuming what you were doing.

In addition, there are many apps where the developers haven’t exploited the back and search buttons properly. In most apps, for example, hitting the “search” button will switch to Bing, even when the app in question has its own search function (for example, Twitter.) This, combined with the lack of multitasking, can be infuriating, especially in the Kindle app (I’ll go into this in a later, full-blown review.)

More baffling is the occasional downright odd design decision, such as the decision to allow the telco to change the IE search page. This, stupidly, means that on O2, hitting “search” inside IE sends you to Yahoo’s awful mobile site, filled with celebrity dross and irrelevant Premier League results. (Ironically, there’s also an advert for 3 Mobile on there.)

This is a shame, given that Bing on WP7 is a shockingly wonderful experience. I’m genuinely not making this up: the Bing app is a perfect distillation of the Windows Phone philosophies of integration and elegant simplicity. A particularly nice touch is the image-based home screen for the Bing app, which, much like the Bing web site, has little tappable targets with interesting titbits about today’s photo. In fact, today’s image of an abandoned house on St. Kilda even has a hotspot that links to a map in the maps application of St. Kilda.

Overall, Windows Phone 7 is a brilliant mobile OS, and I really hope it does well. Microsoft is clearly very serious about it: while the OS has been slow to gain traction in the US, it’s being marketed by telephone companies pretty heavily on this side of the pond.

The question is, can it take down the mighty iOS? Given time, and plenty of feature updates, yes: in this case, WP7 has superior design principles and certainly feels far more modern and extensible (this is an unusual case where Microsoft has actually out-innovated Apple with regards to UI.)

With the Mango update this autumn, Windows Phone will get IM support over (at least) MSN/Windows Live and Facebook, along with custom ringtones, IE9, message unification (so short messages over IM and SMS will be integrated seamlessly into the messaging hub), conversation threading and major improvements to searching.

I can only hope in this respect that MS stick to their guns, don’t let the release slip, and keep innovating.