Bill Gates Talks with Engadget's Peter Rojas

[Mike Temporale]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000440041962/' target='_blank'>http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000440041962/</a><br /><br /></div><i>"In the portable space you have to think of okay what will the phone become over time. The phone is sort of trumps everything. It trumps media players, it trumps cameras, it trumps GPS-mapping devices, digital wallets, and even entertainment. And obviously we’re in the phone software space. We have partners who build the hardware there. And so I’m not sure that you’ll ever see us do something that’s a game-only device. I think you’ll see us do flavors of the phone that are better for gaming and have an affinity to PC gaming and Xenon gaming, but and we’re doing a bit of that now. Nothing dramatic. We see a generation of phones coming that really can do this without too much compromising being available in the two to four year time frame. So at least in that sense we’ll roll out some portable gaming. Right now we don’t see a dedicated device on our road map."</i><br /><br />This quote is Bill Gates response to Engadget's Peter Rojas question about Microsoft's future intentions on portable gaming, when the two sat down at last weeks Windows Hardware Engineering Conference for a little chat. Bill shares his thoughts and insight on topics like portable gaming, Microsoft's mobile phone strategy, and Nokia. It's a great interview, and it's well worth a read.

[David McNamee]

Great interview! Wonder if I can get Bill to sit with me while we're at MEDC next week? :D

[Pony99CA]

Did anybody else find it ironic that, when asked about Symbian, Gates kind of dismissed it by saying:

You really wouldn’t say Symbian, they’re really just an ingredient provider to a few people. You really have to say Nokia, because they’re the ones who take that and add a bunch of things to it and change it, who create a user interface around it. Really you can say it either way.
Ummm, isn't Microsoft a provider of just an ingredient (Windows Mobile) with the OEM actually customizing it for a given device? It seems to me that comparing Windows Mobile with Symbian is an excellent analogy (and maybe Bill realized that, too, given the last sentence in the quotation).

Steve

[Mike Temporale]

I don't know much about Symbian, but it sounds like Bill is saying that Symbian = Windows CE and Nokia = the Smartphone/Pocket PC layer. While Microsoft does allow some customization to the Smartphone layer, it's mainly just pre-loaded applications and start menu layout.

[Pony99CA]

I don't know much about Symbian, but it sounds like Bill is saying that Symbian = Windows CE and Nokia = the Smartphone/Pocket PC layer. While Microsoft does allow some customization to the Smartphone layer, it's mainly just pre-loaded applications and start menu layout.
I'd say Nokia is more like HTC than a software layer. Nokia may be able to do more customization than a Smartphone vendor (I don't really know).

However, looking at Pocket PCs (I'm more familiar with those than Smartphones), you see new and modified Settings applets, task managers to get around Microsoft's brain-dead refusal to have a standard one, support for hardware items (Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, phones, etc.), different button mappings and so on. And that's just in the Pocket PC arena; taking all of the Windows CE market into account shows a lot more variety. So it's not like Windows CE vendors have cookie cutter devices.

Of course, I suppose it's possible that Bill meant something that I'm not aware of, but I'm no newbie to Windows CE, either. I still find the comment a bit ironic. :-)

Steve