

Can Cortana Make Windows Phone 8.1 a Contender?

In general, Microsoft has taken a list of common features and made them more "personal," which is enough to create a different offering in what is clearly a crowded market.

April 4, 2014

Windows Phone 8.1, which Microsoft announced on Wednesday, is a good step in the right direction, but the company still has a way to go towards convincing most users and developers to really consider Windows Phone as a competitor to iPhone or Android phones.

The newest release has a lot of features for a ".1," some of which seem to be just catching up to features from the competitors and some of which are pretty new. In general, Microsoft has taken a list of common features and made them more "personal," which is enough to create a different offering in what is clearly a crowded market. But Microsoft will still need to make progress on the applications front if it is to break through and become a true competitor.

The highlight of the new release is Cortana, which Microsoft Corporate VP Joe Belfiore described as the "first truly personal digital assistant" because it understands more of what you do on other applications as well as the information on the Internet through Microsoft's Bing search service. This replaces the search button on the phone, and when you ask it questions it returns questions, like Apple's Siri. The big difference is that it seems to be monitoring everything you do on your phone to make it more personal. So for instance, if you get an email about a flight, Cortana will offer to update you on the flight status.

Belfiore said Microsoft interviewed lots of real personal assistants to figure out how they work, and that has informed the way Cortana was designed. Real assistants, he said, typically keep a notebook with things such as your interests, your "inner circle" – that is the people who matter most, what "quiet hours" you want when not to be disturbed, etc.

It sounds great, and the demos on stage were impressive. And some of the demos I saw were funny:

Ask it "who is your daddy?" and it answers "Technically speaking that would be Bill Gates. No Big Deal."

But Microsoft is labelling this a "beta" as it needs more users to ask questions of the system to make it work better. Indeed, trying it out later in a demo area, I saw some things that worked quite well and others that were head-scratchingly bad, possibly because it really does want to be used by a particular user and learn from your preferences.

slides/joe belfiore build 2014 For instance, when I asked it "how did the Cubs do?" it just displayed a link to various websites, but when I asked "What was the Cubs score?" it gave me the correct (if disappointing) answer. When I asked it "What is the weather in New York?" it gave me the correct weather, but when I followed up with "Will it rain this weekend?" it gave me the weekend weather in Atlanta. My guess is it will improve when it's on a personal phone, instead of one being shared by lots of people in a demo room.

I've been impressed by the progress that Siri and Google Now have made in natural language query response over the past couple of years, but I do think there's plenty of room for improvement, including better personalization. Cortana works with most Microsoft tools, such as Bing Health and Fitness Data, and with third-party products such as Facebook. Again, that should lead to a product that knows more about you, but that could be a problem if it gets things wrong. I particularly like the way Cortana gives the user control of their settings, so you can edit the notebook to make sure it really knows where your home and office is, what time you want the phone not to disturb you, who you want to override those "quiet hours," etc. That's a level of personal control that could be quite useful, and I'm glad Microsoft doesn't think Cortana is smart enough to get it all right. I'm looking forward to trying this out for real when I can get an update for my Windows Phone.

Other new features include an action center for simply getting to the most frequently used controls, something the iPhone has and most Android phones have had for a long time, but one that will be quite appreciated. The calendar has been improved, and there are a number of other smaller features such as the ability to set it to automatically sign you in to many public Wi-Fi networks.

The system now has a variety of new enterprise features, which Microsoft clearly wants to target at a market where it thinks BlackBerry is vulnerable. These include an automatically triggered VPN, which turns on when you try to visit an internal website or corporate applications; S/Mime for sending encrypted mail, better enterprise Wi-Fi support, and enhanced mobile device management, which lets you whitelist or blacklist particular applications. For instance, an IT department could prevent users from installing games. Such control may not be what individuals are looking for, but it may make it more attractive to large enterprises.

slides/elop build 2014 (800 by 600)

On the hardware side, Belfiore reiterated that Windows Phone was now working on lower-end hardware, and showed off some low-end phones based on a reference platform Microsoft created with Qualcomm. And Nokia executive vice president Stephen Elop (who soon will be head of the devices division at Microsoft, once the Nokia acquisition closes) introduced several new Nokia Lumia phones. The Lumia 930 is similar to the already available Lumia Icon on Verizon, but is designed for more global LTE bands. The 930 has a 5-inch screen, Snapdragon 800 processor, and a 20-megapixel camera. The Lumia 630 and 630 Dual-Sim are 3G phones aimed at lower price points, with a 4.5-inch display. And the Lumia 635 is a very interesting LTE variant, notably in that it should retail for just $189 without subsidy. Nokia has said this will be available in July from a variety of carriers. All will run Windows Phone 8.1.

To date, Windows Phone and Nokia Lumias have had pretty good success in the big European countries and some other markets, but lag in the United States and China. With a broader range of hardware, the companies are hoping to make inroads, particularly against low- and mid-range Android devices. One nice thing is that Microsoft and Nokia have both said that all phones running Windows Phone 8.0 will get the 8.1 update, which is great for users and developers, who can have a single phone target.

Of course, the big question remains applications. Microsoft and Nokia talked about how they have hundreds of thousands of Windows phone apps, including most of the top sellers, but there are still gaps – particularly in other markets and in vertical market applications. I often find the Windows Phone versions of many big-name apps lag behind the iPhone and Android versions. Microsoft is moving toward a universal Windows runtime, where one application can work on phones and the larger Windows 8.1 environment. That looks cool, and it should help, but Microsoft clearly has a long way to go here.

But overall, Windows Phone 8.1 looks like a big step forward. Yes, most of the features such as the action center and Cortana assistant sound like they are playing catch up, but it has enough new and different features that it keeps the platform more personal. I'm looking forward to trying it out.
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About Michael J. Miller

Michael J. Miller



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