Can Microsoft make its future mobile?

By Tim Weber Business editor, BBC News website

Sony Ericsson's Xperia X1 is at the high end of Windows Mobile phones

You want a phone that can do it all? Internet, music, photos, films, documents, texting, instant messaging, diary, contacts and ... err ... phone calls?

Then a smartphone is right for you. But as the market for high-end mobiles gets ever more crowded, which should you pick?

The global market leader, Symbian, makes the software that runs most of Nokia's smart phones (and a few others).

Research in Motion with its e-mail friendly Blackberry devices has cornered the corporate market and is pushing into the consumer space.

Apple is minting it with its sleek but expensive iPhone. And only a few months ago internet search giant Google entered the field with its Linux-based Android software, designed to power internet-savvy mobile phones.

Oh, and then there is Microsoft. For years the giant of desktop computing has tried to push into the mobile phone market - not without success, but ultimately remaining a niche player.

Two things held Microsoft back in the past: technology and usability.

For years mobile phone technology simply wasn't advanced enough to play to the strengths of devices that were actually mini computers.

Windows Mobile and other smartphones were held back because they had to "live with the hardware capabilities of the past; key pieces were missing," says Andy Lees, the boss of Microsoft's Mobile Communications group.

The Achilles heel

Samsung's Omnia tries hard not to be an iPhone clone

But the real Achilles heel of Microsoft's devices was their abysmal user interface - firmly wedded to the look and feel of old-fashioned computer desktops, a concept that doesn't work on small screens.

At long last this is changing, although it is not Microsoft doing the job. Instead, phone manufacturers are busy building user-friendly interfaces to sit on the Windows platform.

Take Samsung's Omnia, for example, an all touchscreen phone that tries for an iPhone look and feel without being a rip-off.

It largely succeeds, with its 5 megapixel camera, highly useful expansion slot and overall good looks. On the downside, its touchscreen can at times be infuriating while Samsung's interface designer clearly is not a graduate of the Apple school of cool.

HTC's Touch Diamond is another contender. The Taiwanese company has been at the forefront of pushing the boundaries of what can be done with the Windows mobile platform. Many smartphones sold under the labels of network operators like T-Mobile and Orange are actually HTC designs.

The HTC Diamond does away with the Windows look and feel

The Diamond goes the furthest in changing the way a Windows phone behaves. Its futuristic-looking screen has nice features like a picture-led phonebook: Two clicks and the phone's camera takes a picture of your mate and puts it in an easily browseable "stack" to ensure his or her phonebook entry stands out.

This touchscreen phone, however, exposes another problem plaguing most smartphones: a slick interface requires serious hardware.

When HTC launched the Diamond, using its "Touch-Flo" screen felt like wading through treacle. Now, one memory upgrade later, the phone begins to deliver on its promise, albeit still reluctantly.

This is not just a Windows problem, though. Blackberry's first all-touchscreen mobile, Storm, is suffering a similar if not worse sluggishness, and has been panned by many reviewers and users.

Power hungry

Like all microcomputers masquerading as phones, Windows smartphones are power hungry. Intense usage - phone calls, web browsing, music and office applications - quickly drains the battery.

Here at least Windows devices can play a trump card over Apple's iPhone: their batteries are not sealed in and can be swapped easily for back-ups.

Take the most accomplished Windows mobile tested for this article, Sony Ericsson's Xperia X1. Its user interface can be changed with a couple of clicks to fit the owner's priorities of the moment - search, work or play.

The power hungry X1 boasts a keyboard

It offers a surprisingly handy combination of touchscreen, touchpad, buttons, toggles and most importantly a slide-out keyboard.

All this drains the X1's battery, barely getting me through the day without a recharge - at least on the pre-production models tested.

The tiny keyboard harks back to the days of Psion personal organisers but is very comfortable to use, easily beating any Blackberry (at least for me: large parts of this article were drafted on an Xperia X1).

"Windows Mobile is a very powerful platform for us," acknowledges Sony Ericsson's X1 product manager Magnus Anderson. "It's the perfect fit for both business and pleasure."

The price of being smart

So far, though, these high-end phones are mainly for "early adopters" that need "seamless connectivity of email and office applications," says Mr Anderson - and they have a price tag to match.

The ease of synchronising diaries, documents and email with PCs is indeed a key selling point of Windows mobile devices, one that Microsoft executives are eager to underline as they list the synchronisation and compatibility woes encountered by owners of iPhones and Nokia smartphones.

Smartphones are expensive, regardless whether they run on Windows, Linux, Symbian or the iPhone's OS X, because it is hardware like the touchscreen that is driving up the cost.

That pushes the price of many such phones beyond $300 (