Steve Ballmer and Joe Belfiore: Windows Phone 7 Press Conference

Remarks by Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer, and Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President, Windows Phone Program Management
New York, NY
Oct. 11, 2010

STEVE BALLMER: Well, thanks, and welcome, everyone. We are very pleased you would spend time with us here today, and that we get a chance to share with you the new Windows Phone.

I’ve been looking forward to this day for some time, I would say, and we think very much that after today you will agree with us that with Windows Phone we really have built with our partners a different kind of a phone. And it is an exciting opportunity for us to have a chance to be here with you to show this very different kind of a phone.

In a sense you could say the differences in the Windows Phone are as much about not just what you’re going to do with the phone, but how you’re going to do it.

We’ve really put our energy and our design creativity into bringing together the things that you love. We’ve focused in on the way real people really want to use their phones when they’re on the go. We want to let you get in, out, and back to life, and have that be as fast and simple as humanly possible.

We set out to build a phone that was thoroughly modern, modern in the hardware that it used, modern in its design principles, modern in the way that it embraces what people do today with Internet services and the like.

And we hope you’ll agree that with all of that in mind we’ve taken a very different tack at the same time.

We think there’s a lot of things that you’ll see today that will help you understand how the Windows Phone is different, but I’d focus on two key themes: always delightful, and wonderfully mine.

Always delightful. We wanted the Windows Phone to be delightful across a range of different hardware devices, through a range of different scenarios, and across a range of different applications and experiences. We wanted it to be that way for the consumer and for the developer, who will build a growing set of Windows Phone applications.

We wanted the Windows Phone to be always delightful for you, whether you were looking for a place to eat, reading mail, catching up with friends, or making a phone call, for example.

We also stressed this notion of having the phone be wonderfully mine or yours or yours or the next person. Everybody should be able to take a look at a Windows Phone and say, I can represent me in this device.

I put up here on this screen my phone, the way I have made the Windows Phone wonderfully mine, with my pictures, with my e-mail, with my friends, with my son the lacrosse player, with my trip report notes that I’m taking all the time; it’s my start screen, my friends, my activities, my world, and, of course, my avatar at the end of the day. (Laughter.) Maybe in a sense pretty obviously my avatar. There you go.

So, we wanted to really allow that to happen, and yet also to bring that together with a set of devices that could be wonderfully mine, hardware for my needs, my screen, my keyboard, my weight, my size, my camera, my speakers: It’s going to be mine; and the diversity in experience, and yet the customization for me is very important.

We’ll have nine phones available when the Windows Phone ships here in the United States in November, nine different phones. There’s a range of phones here, from LG, from Samsung, from HTC, and from Dell.

You see phones with keyboards, you see phones like the LG phone that can play to TV, you’ll see super beautiful screens like the beautiful screen on this Samsung, the AMOLED screen, very large screens as you see on this HTC device right here, and of course ruggedized for the hardest user type phone like this Dell device.

We give you the ability off of a number of these phones from LG to take your world and play it on your TV.

So, the range of things that people will do with these devices — and they are beautiful, each in its own way exceptionally beautiful, the hardware and the way the software is always delightful across each and every one of these experiences.

And so we think it’s important to have consistent delight and yet have people be able to have a set of choices that are wonderfully their own.

Now, we’re joined in this endeavor by a broad set of partners from around the world, not only the hardware manufacturers who build these beautiful devices but we’ll also have over 60 mobile operators around the world offering these devices in more than 30 countries.

The operators around the world play such an important role in also bringing to life with personality, with services, with personalization, making the phone wonderfully mine for each and every one of the millions of people around the planet. And so we appreciate the support of our operators.

With that, I’m going to turn things over to Ralph De La Vega, president and chief operating officer for AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, a key launch partner for Microsoft here in the United States for the Windows Phone. Please welcome Ralph. (Applause.)

RALPH DE LA VEGA: Thank you. Good morning! Thank you, Steve. On behalf of everyone at AT&T, congratulations on a great Windows Phone 7.

You know, this is an exciting day for both companies, and most of all it’s an exciting day for customers as we prepare to launch a breakthrough Smartphone experience with Windows Phone 7.

You know, AT&T and Microsoft have a long history of working together, and I am proud of the very many accomplishments that we’ve achieved. Together we launched the first Windows Mobile device back in 2003, and a few years later, AT&T joined with Microsoft to launch AT&T Uverse TV.

Back then, we had our share of skeptics. They didn’t think we could launch an entirely new TV experience. But our job is anticipating customer needs, and meeting them with innovation, and just last week AT&T Uverse TV was ranked the highest customer satisfaction by JD Power in every single region where we were eligible.

And here we go again ready to make history with Windows Phone 7.

At AT&T we know a thing or two about Smartphones. We have more smartphone customers than any other U.S. carrier, and we also offer the widest choice of smartphone operating systems. So, we have seen our share of designs and OS plans.

When Steve and his team showed us Windows Phone 7, we knew it was going to be a winner. The user experience like you have seen is unlike anything that we have seen. It’s an awesome experience, it’s a unique, fun to use interface that gives you superfast access to content and data on the nation’s fastest mobile broadband network.

Microsoft has done a great job in making the user interface fun, fast and personal, and whether it’s content on your home screen or integration with Uverse TV and Xbox, the Windows 7 experience is built around you.

And we back up that experience by providing a consistent high-speed network experience, which will only get faster and better as we move towards 4G.

Today, I’m proud to announce that beginning on November the 8th Windows Phone 7 will be a cornerstone of our leading smartphone portfolio, and we’ll be launching not one, not two, but three amazing new devices from LG, from HTC, and from Samsung.

First up is the LG Quantum. The Quantum features a 3.5 inch capacitive touchscreen, a 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor, and 16 gigs of onboard storage, plus a fantastic QWERTY keyboard that is one of the best that we have ever tested.

The LG Quantum is a great device, featuring a full physical keyboard, a great fit for messaging-centric customers or e-mail heavy mobile pros.

The play-to app uses DLNA technology so you can wirelessly stream content to compatible TVs, Windows 7 PCs, and other devices.

And we’re going to price the Quantum at 199.99.

Next is the HTC Surround. The surround is the perfect device for media and gaming enthusiasts. It features a 3.8 inch capacitive touchscreen, 16 gigs of onboard storage, with a 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor, and a 5 megapixel camera.

It’s also the only smartphone with two Dolby surround sound speakers that slide up to deliver a unique and compelling multimedia experience. You have got to hear this to experience it. The sound quality is terrific.

It even features a kickstand on the back so you can set it down and listen to your music, host a conference call, or enjoy watching videos.

We’ll talk more about video content in a minute, but the Surround will be priced at 199.99.

Finally, the Samsung Focus. The headline here is that the Focus will have the best-looking screen on any Windows Phone. It’s got a 4-inch super AMOLED screen display. And if you haven’t seen this screen technology, be sure to check it out at the demo station. It is simply amazing, and Windows Phone 7 brings it to life.

It has a 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor, 8 gigs of onboard storage, plus a 5 megapixel camera.

The Focus is also the thinnest Windows Phone in the U.S. at just 9.9 millimeters, and we’re pricing the Samsung Focus at 199.99.

All Windows Phones, in fact, have at least a full gigahertz processor and have several other great standard features under the hood, and we’re thrilled to be launching the Samsung Focus on November the 8th, and the HTC Surround and the LG Quantum just a few weeks later.

But that’s not all. We know that our customers love to use their smartphones for both business and entertainment, and today we’re announcing a new entertainment option for Windows Phone customers. Uverse mobile is an application we launched earlier this year to let our Uverse TV customers download and watch hit TV shows on your smartphone.

Starting next month, we’ll bring this capability to Windows Phone 7 customers, and if you don’t have AT&T Uverse TV but still want to watch hit shows like Mad Men and ESPN right on your smartphone, we’re going to let you do that nationwide for any Windows Phone for a low monthly fee. And that’s just one of the ways we’re working with Microsoft to extend this operated Uverse TV experience to more devices.

We’re also excited about one new capability for Uverse. In just a few days, Uverse will be available on Xbox 360. You can get the Uverse TV experience using your Xbox 360 as your Uverse receiver, and we’re the first TV provider in the U.S. to offer this.

So, whether you’re watching hit TV shows, exploring the universe of mobile applications, or taking your office on the road, with Windows Phone 7 devices you’re going to get a breakthrough experience on three compelling new devices.

At AT&T our goal is to offer the broadest selection of smartphones, and Windows Phone 7 will be a major addition to our lineup.

Again, Steve, congratulations. We’re proud of the work you’ve done, and we’re proud of joining you to bring Windows Phone 7 to the U.S. as your partner. Thank you. (Applause.)

STEVE BALLMER: I talked about the fact with Windows Phone 7 it’s not just what you do, but how you do it: in, out, back to life. There’s no way to kind of bring it out for you any better than to do a demonstration, and there’s nobody better to show you Windows Phone 7 than one of the key designers, Joe Belfiore, from Microsoft. So, sit back and enjoy while Joe gives you a little bit of a tour. Joe. (Applause.)

JOE BELFIORE: Thank you. Hello! I’m really thrilled to be here with you today and walk you through the final software experience for Windows Phone 7.

And before I jump into a demo, I just wanted to mention when we set out to change the design of Windows Phones, we really asked ourselves two simple questions — and this goes back to what Steve has been talking about: How can we build a phone that takes those everyday tasks and simplifies them and makes them possible to do with just as few taps as possible, so they can be done quickly and easily, and how can we take all the power can capability that’s been blossoming in Web Services and in applications, and put those in a phone experience in a way that makes them faster and simpler for people to deal with, so they get all that great power, but in a way that’s very easy?

And the way we answered that was to try to build a smart design where in as many places as possible the phone anticipates the things that you want and need, lets you customize it to make it really deeply personal, so tasks are fast and easy.

And then we also created Windows Phone hubs. There are six hubs, and the idea of the hub is to have a dedicated destination place for common tasks like photos or like music and video or your people. And when you go there, you get all of the benefit of Web Services, third party applications, and the content on your phone in a simple, integrated way.

And that’s our unique point of view, and how we think Windows Phone is going to be a lot easier and faster for people to use.

So, with that, let me find my demo phone here, and I’m going to give you a quick walkthrough.

Now, I just turned it off. What I’m going to do is show you a demo, and what you’ll see up on the screen there is exactly what I do with my finger here. So, you’re seeing a projection of this phone.

And our idea of smart design actually starts right there on the lock screen where you’ll notice down on the bottom of the lock screen we’ve put up your next calendar appointment. So, if you just want to have a quick glance at where you’re supposed to go next, you pull your phone out, you turn it on, you can see your next appointment, and you’re off and good to go.

Now, when I pan this up to unlock it, you see the Windows Phone start experience. Down on the bottom there in hardware you’ll see we have three hardware buttons. These are consistent on all the phones. There’s a back button, really simple, takes you back to where you were, a start button to get you to this experience, and a search button; more on that later.

And as I pan down, you’ll see these live tiles are lighting up with information about all my experiences, and telling me I have two unread mail messages. It’s telling me I have an unread text message. That was my last Facebook post backstage, ready to rock. It’s showing up on my phone and on all my friends’ phones. You see my Xbox Live avatar down there. The pictures hub has automatically customized with pictures of my twins. The music and video hub shows me what I’ve last been playing.

And one of the key features for making this phone really wonderfully yours, really deeply personal, is being able to put the people that you care about right up there on your start experience in a live tile. And these tiles are live because, as Steve updated his Facebook post, you can see last night he’s on the ground in New York City. If he posts pictures, I’ll see them right there. I don’t have to go in and out of a whole lot of applications to see all these sorts of things, it’s aggregated for me right on the home screen.

The Home screen, Start screen is customizable. So, AT&T phones will ship out of the box with some Tiles for the Uverse experience, and other AT&T value adds. And then, I can customize it with things like a note, or a Web page, or applications that I’m using.

And we really mean for people to be able to do this in a very natural, straightforward way, so everyone will. It’s not hard to customize. Let’s take a real example here. I’ve been spending a bunch of time with Steve getting ready for this. Fortunately, after this demo is over, I’m going to get back to spending some more time on my personal life. So, I’m going to touch Steve here and say goodbye to Steve by clicking the little “unpin” button.

And down here is my wife, who says, big announce today, don’t screw it up, Joe. Thank you. I’ll press and hold on her, and you see those Tiles fade into the background? That’s a nice subtle way of telling the user, you can move this one around. So, I’ll pull her up here. I’m just going to drop her into that spot. And, voila, now I have moved my wife back up towards the front and center of my start screen, because I’m going to spend a little bit more time on my personal life now.

Anyway, that’s the start experience, and how fast and easy it is to create an environment that really becomes deeply personal. It’s about the people you care about, the tasks you want to do, and it’s just one button click away always.

Now, there’s another great scenario which I think illustrates our idea of smart design. You saw up there, I have twin daughters. They just turned three. They’re really fast moving kids, and I wanted a phone that really can take great pictures. And taking great pictures means more than just image quality. We have that. But we wanted a great photo taking experience.

So, imagine, I’m going to turn my phone off. Imagine it’s in my pocket. Think of these three-year-old girls running around doing some amusing thing. I do not have much time to get a good picture of them. Now, watch how I do it on Windows Phone 7. I’ll pull the phone out of my pocket, press the camera button, the phone wakes up immediately, gives me the camera and, voila, I’ve snapped and I’ve gotten my picture. Very fast and easy.

Now, I want you to watch this again because a subtle thing actually happened there. I’m going to take the picture. Now, watch where the picture goes. Here I go, one, two, three, snap. Good. Did you see that? It moved over there to the left.

Another really common task in photo-taking, if I’ve got a great picture of my kids, I want to post it and share with my friends. Right there in the camera, I can just pan over, choose a picture, touch the picture, and I get a menu of options. I’m going to say, upload to Facebook, and with just a couple of taps, I’m now sharing that picture with my friends.

One of the things that we do is, we really try to connect to these cloud services in an interesting way. Every picture I take, I can set my camera up to automatically upload the minute I take it so that it’s safely stored in the cloud, and it’s available to me from a website, so I can get it, share it, or use it on my PC.

Another thing that’s kind of cool, you can see here I’ve got my camera roll. There are the two pictures I’ve taken. But I can pan back in time, that’s yesterday’s rehearsal. I’ve got some pictures of my kids. I can put this in filmstrip mode, and sort of pan back and see all the pictures I’ve taken from the summer. And I want you to see some of the image quality. This is real. I didn’t set this up for a demo or anything. I was literally out with my family using my Windows Phone, and I got some terrific looking pictures like that. So, we’re really  we’re excited about the camera experience. We’re excited about this idea of smart design where you can go from pocket to picture to posted on the Web literally in just a few seconds. And that’s the idea of really trying to rethink the design in a way that’s about people, and lets them get in and get out, and get back to their real meaningful lives.

OK. So, let’s talk about some more sort of intense and immersive tasks like doing e-mail. Here you see I have my Outlook Tile, which has a 2 on it telling me I have a couple of messages I haven’t seen yet. So, I’m going to pan in here, and in this particular case, I’m looking at e-mail that’s coming from an Exchange Server. But one of the things we tried to do generally was make sure the phone worked for your work life as well as your personal life.

So, here I have an Exchange e-mail, and you can see I can pan through all these messages. The performance is good. I can pivot over and just see unread messages. I can pivot over and see messages that I flagged using the Outlook experience on my PC desktop. So, there’s nice integration there for Outlook users. I can pan over and see Urgent. And, as you’d expect, there’s a nice, rich, full-featured e-mail experience.

So, here I have a mail from Steve, is this the right slide deck? I open it up, I can see Steve’s picture, and you can see he has sent me a slide deck that he wants me to take a look at and confirm that I’ve got it right with all the right animation.

So, one of the things that we tried to do, if you think about this continuum of experiences, is to enable work as well as play, and I want to give you a quick look at PowerPoint 2010 built for mobile.

So, here’s the first slide, and I’m going to pan over, and watch the slide animations there. This is a PowerPoint 2010 document that was created on the desktop, which is rendering with excellent fidelity here on the phone. As I pan, you see the hardware-assisted animations. Graphics are rendered very smoothly. It looks terrific on the phone. In fact, because I’m projecting here, I really could be doing my slide presentation using my phone.

And these capabilities are not just limited to sort of looking at content, but also editing as well. I can touch and bring up the App bar, which is consistent throughout the Windows Phone experience. I can choose to edit my slides. I can choose to go to the notes, and maybe comment on the notes in here or change the notes. I can navigate through the slide deck by outline view. I’m not going to do all those things, but the Office capabilities that are built in are unique and incredibly powerful in Windows Phone. And I’ll come back to those in a little bit.

So, here I am, I’ve opened my e-mail from Steve. Yes, do I have the right slide deck? I want to show you another place where we’ve really tried to focus a lot of energy, and where we think we are delivering an unparalleled experience in smart design, and that is text entry. Now, when you think about text entry, this is the kind of technology problem that involves great hardware, terrific drivers, smart software, all working together in harmony, and it’s a place that we’ve spent a lot of time and energy with our hardware partners to do a great job.

So, what I’m going to do. I’m just going to type as fast as I possibly can, and I’m not going to look at the results, because that would slow me down. I’m going to make mistakes. I’m a little nervous. I’ve got wires hanging out the side of the phone. So, let me set your expectations there. So, Steve says, is this the right slide deck?

Yes, Steve. I think you have the right deck there. Did you like the animations?

Let’s see how did I do? Yes, Steve. I think you have the right deck rare. Did you like the animations? Now, come on, that was pretty good, don’t you think? I was cranking away there, and Windows Phone just figured all that out. But actually that’s not the best part, because it would be unfair to think that it would get 100 percent, obviously it’s not getting 100 percent. So, the question is, how do you do when someone makes a mistake?

Well, here’s the smart design. Just like you’re used to on the desktop, I can go back. You see the red squigglies. I simply touch the word “there,” and I can pan through. I mistouched the suggestion bar, shaky fingers. So, I’m going to do that again. I can’t remember what I typed, something like y-h-e-r-e for there.

I’ll go back and choose that and you can see this far here it gives me a bunch of word suggestions. So, it’s really fast and easy for me to go back and choose the correct word. And now to really get smart design you’ve got to think about, what if what the users type was what they meant and you corrected to the wrong thing. In that case, I can go back and touch the word and you see, Yhere still there. We remember what you typed and if we made a mistake in correcting it we let you go back and fix it. That’s what we really mean when we say smart design. It’s about the phone understanding what you are trying to do and making those simple, everyday tasks really easy. So, having corrected my e-mail I’m just going to push the send button and that’s off to Steve. I’ve now sent my response and we’ll pretend I just typed real fast and click send.

Another thing that we tried to do when we thought about this e-mail experience, when we thought about how people are accustomed to using e-mail and calendaring on their desktops, was to make sure we offered Outlook integration on the phone that lives up to what the Outlook brand is about on the desktop.

So, let me scroll down here you’ll see I have an e-mail from Steve, which is a meeting invitation to a post-event dinner. So, I’m going to open this up and you see here is Steve suggesting post-event dinner at TGI Friday, somewhere here in New York, OK. You’ll notice the address there is underlined, more on that in a second. That happened automatically. Steve just typed in the address. Then below that it says show scheduling conflicts. Right within the e-mail this meeting request is looking at my calendar to detect whether I have a conflict or not, and it’s letting me know. So, I can make a smart decision right here in the e-mail about whether to accept it, or not.

So, I’m going to touch show scheduling conflicts and jump in here to the calendar where you’ll see, in green these are my work appointments coming form Exchange, and in red these are my personal appointments coming from Hotmail calendars. Just like e-mail we work with lots of services, Exchange, Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail, all those services are supported. In this particular case Steve is suggesting a dinner that conflicts with a conference call I have set up with our design team back in Redmond.

So, I need to decide am I going to accept Steve’s invitation, or not. Now being able to see in the calendar gives me a little bit more context to know whether to say yes or no. What I’m going to do is touch that meeting appointment and there’s even more things that we’re trying to do to make this helpful for people.

Just for a second imagine this is a meeting I’m about to go to. And I’m going to my calendar, because I’m running late. I can open the meeting up and down there on the lower right you see a button. I’ll pull the app bar up so you can see it a little more clearly. The I’ll be late button, with one touch you can push I’ll be late and then confirm you want to notify either the meeting organizer, or the meeting attendees and it sends a quick automatic e-mail to them, letting you know that you’ll be late. We think that’s an example of smart design.

Back to the scenario I was talking about, Steve has sent me this invitation to a post-event dinner. I’m trying to decide whether or not to go. It’s at TGI Fridays. I don’t want to have to go somewhere that I can’t walk, because the weather here in New York has been beautiful. I want to see where this is.

So, he’s kindly put the address right in the meeting. The system automatically recognizes the address. So, I don’t have to go through any cumbersome process to get that information into a distinct map application somewhere. I can just touch it. I go right here to the underlying thing, touch it, and the Bing maps experience comes up with the address shown right there, and the little yellow diamond shows where I am. So, of course, I can zoom in. But, what I want to do is use the service to help me make a decision about whether to go here or not. If I pull up the app bar this is another way we consistently provide commands throughout the system. So, it’s easy for people to find when you pull it up. You get more information. I’m going to touch the directions button and I’m going to let the back end tell me how long it will take to get there and whether I could do it best by walking or driving.

So, you see, it came up and said, for this you want to drive. That’s the car in the upper right. And I could step through all the steps here and you see the map animation to show me each step along the way. And if I choose the end there’s the end. So, now I know I have to drive to go here. Maybe I want to see what neighborhood this is in to really decide if this is the right place for us to go.

And I’m going to zoom in on the map, and you see the directions, they are still shown there as an overlay. And when I get in close enough the map automatically switches into a satellite photograph view, so I can sort of get a sense for the area, and lo and behold, there’s Madison Square Garden. So, now I’m really worried. OK. The traffic is going to be terrible. I think I have a good excuse now. We should probably get local food, rather than a place that’s a big chain. I think I’m going to tell Steve maybe we should go somewhere different.

I can touch the where am I button down on the bottom. The map will zoom up and out and into my location here at the same view level so I can see that, as well. What I’m going to do now is go  sorry, I’m going to go back here and I want to find different place. So, I can give Steve a suggestion. And a great way to do that is to use the search capabilities that are built into the phone. And we thought that using your mobile phone to find stuff in the real world with a dedicated hardware button for search was a super-important scenario to deliver. And so we’ve built a lot of work, both in the phone and on the Bing backend to make these tasks really simple.

So, let’s say I want to suggest to Steve Thai food. So, I’m going to push the search button and there comes the Bing page. You notice up there it says New York. It’s already recognized my location and that works via GPS, via Wi-Fi, lots of mechanisms to help get the location. I start typing and the Bing backend is able to make suggestions based on the kinds of searches that people are doing in mobile. And searching for restaurants is a pretty common one. So, it suggests Thai food. I’m going to pick that and what we do that’s different, we wanted to move beyond just an HTML page with a bunch of blue hyperlinks and give you a rich search experience that helps you make decisions about where to go in the real world and what kinds of things to do.

So, I’ve done a search for Thai food and what you see up on the top I get a little map result. I can zoom in on that to see where all these places are, or I get a rich list view that shows me a whole lot of Thai restaurants. Now, I might have typed Thai food in, because I wanted to learn about Thai food, or maybe decide whether a dish was what I wanted. So, right here this view also gives me access to Web results. It’s just a fast pivot away and I could jump to the Wikipedia entry. But, in this case Bing actually did guess correctly. I’m interested in finding a Thai restaurant. So, I can look down the list and I want you to notice the ways in which we’ve focused on helping you make a decision.

So, here’s this list of Thai restaurants. They’re pretty much all really close by, a mile away, a half-mile away, 1.1 miles away. And if Bing has been able to get a rating the rating is shown. Now, I might be inclined to go to this Krower (ph) Thai, which is just a half-mile away, but if I panned down the list I can see, well, you know, it doesn’t have that great of a rating and Isle Thai has four and a half stars.

Let me touch Isle Thai and Bing is giving me a bunch of information presented in a very consistent way to help me decide whether this is where I want to go. There’s the phone number, so I can call and talk to them and ask them a question. I can navigate to their Web site, or right here, fast and easy, I’ve got the hours for the restaurant. So, I know if I should go.

Similarly, I can pan over and actually read some of the reviews that people have posted to get a sense for whether I trust them and whether that’s information I want to use to make my decision. So, having looked all this, I’m not pretty convinced I have a better alternative. We should get local food here in New York. Something we can’t get in Seattle. So, down here on the app bar I’m going to push the share button to share my search results with Steve. I could choose to send it to an e-mail, or I could choose to send it to him via a text message.

So, I’m going to use the messaging experience. I’ll start typing. There, we recognize Steve and you notice it’s put the address right in here. So, when I press send, and that goes for Steve’s phone and he gets it, the address will be recognized. He can touch it just once, immediately navigate to the map and get directions without having to do a lot of manual work.

And that, in our opinion is an example of smart design, really trying to knit this back together in a way that the user gets Bing to help them make a decision. The map helps find where something is, and then all the communications capability for the phone helps present that to somebody else.

There are lots of thing that we’ve tried to do well with Bing. We have a system called Instant Answers, where we’ll give you the answer to a question on things like celebrity information, or movie times, or stock quotes. And we wanted to reduce that system down to literally one click. So, wherever I am on my phone I can press and hold start, Alaska Flight 7. Just talk to the phone. The audio is packaged up and sent to the server where our TellMe service can analyze it using the cloud backend. If we have network connectivity here in a second you’ll see TellMe.

Now, imagine this is a big cloud service with tons of servers that’s been analyzing people’s own calls. So, we’re having a network connectivity problem. Trust me, and you all will get to try this on your own phones very shortly. The TellMe service is very good at  I’m going to try it again. I’m feeling brave. There we go, Alaska Flight 7. As you know, it can be tricky when many of you have cell phones and Wi-Fi connections in one crowded room. See, I trust that TellMe backend.

So, I just speak a few words, my audio is sent to the servers where the servers do the hard work of recognizing it, and I get back an instant answer. There’s Alaska Flight 7, which leaves New York at 6:30 p.m., it’s going to arrive in Seattle on time tonight at 9:40. A really common task, you have to go pick somebody up at the airport, you’re heading to a flight. Just press and say it to your phone and let your phone do the work for you. We think that’s another great example of smart design. OK. So, that’s smart design. Hopefully you get the idea of these design touches and was that we wanted to make the phone really delightful in your use and helping you get in, get out, get back to your real life.

Now, I want to talk about the Windows Phone hubs, where we try to integrate all the aspects of the most common experiences. And I’m going to start with people. There are six Windows Phone hubs, and they center around common tasks. And the way they work is, imagine a screen that’s wider than your phone, and so it’s very convenient for you to just pan over. I can see recent people, I can see all people, or I can see what’s new with my people. And in the people hub, we try to pull together all the people that you care about. The recent people are people that I’ve communicated with. And, therefore, it’s like automatically creating a speed dial for me. But it’s better than just a speed dial. In fact, you saw on my start experience, I put my wife. So, at any time, I can press start, I can go to my wife, who we moved right here, and with just a couple of presses, I not only have speed dial, and speed text, which you’d expect from a phone, but I also have speed wall postings. So, I can go right here, touch “write on wall” if I want to post something on my wife’s Facebook wall. I can pan over and see what’s new with this person. So, I have speed social networking consumption. If you think about the way people are communicating today, they’re communicating with things like phone and text, but they’re also communicating through a social network. And you can see here is what my wife has been posting on Facebook.

Now, thanks for the kind sentiment there at the top. She has posted pictures from our son’s birthday. She took our kids to the local fair. We were excited when the Seattle Storm had a great year in the WNBA. You’ve got the idea. It’s a way to stay in touch with the people that I care most about, and put them front and center in the experience.

As I said, the people hub also keeps track of these things for you automatically, so recent is always right there. Here’s the list of all my people, that’s the me tile up there were I can go update my own Facebook status. But as I pan down, you’ll see I have lots and lots of people. What we do, you’ll also notice they pretty much all have photos. And the reason why that’s true, we take your contacts from all the services you connect to. You just sign in once at the beginning, sign into Windows Live once, sign in to Facebook once, sign in to Yahoo! once, and we link all of these contacts together automatically so when I open one, besides I forgot to point this out, when I open my wife, you’ll notice up on top there it says, this is here information coming from both Windows Live and Facebook. So, it’s really easy for me to get at all that content in one place.

And, as you saw in my wife, I can get the what’s new information for all my people aggregated together. So, if I had a few spare moments where I’m standing in line somewhere, I can jump into the people hub, and see what everybody is posting on Windows Live, or Facebook, or other social networks that connect through Windows Live. So, that’s the people hub. The idea is to bring together everything you care about from people.

Next up, let’s talk about pictures. We think Windows Phones are going to be absolutely amazing devices for taking pictures, and for dealing with pictures. And you saw some of that. But I want to show you the pictures hub. Because these phone devices have such gorgeous screens, and are so handy, we wanted to make it a great way for you to consume pictures on your own on your phone, or use your phone as a device to show other people pictures.

So, when I go into the pictures hub, those are my twins, and that background was automatically selected for me. I didn’t have to do any work. The phone helps in that customization. As I pan over, you can see some of the pictures I’ve taken recently, and other pictures that I’ve favorited in my experience. And on the far right, again, here’s the what’s new feed. But in this case it’s focused on all of my friends’ activity with photos. Any time my friends take photos and post them on Windows Live, or Facebook, or any connected network on Windows Live, they automatically show up here in the feed. So, I have one place to go to browse through my friends’ activity as it relates to photos. And that ability to browse photos in the cloud isn’t limited to just what your friends do.

A very real scenario for me is, I’ll see someone and they say, how are the twins? Do you have any pictures? Well, on my phone, I have the pictures I’ve taken, I have folders that I’ve synced from my PC, but the phone automatically also shows me all of my albums on Facebook and Windows Live. So, here you see a Barcelona album on Windows Live. And down here is my family photo album on Facebook. I can simply touch, I’ll turn the phone sideways, and now I have a really nice, high quality way of showing people like you pictures of my cute kids. Don’t you love them, just what you were hoping to see. There we go.

And because this is on a social network, I can pan up and add a comment. I can see other people’s comments. I can really make that photo experience of my own photos with the community out there very natural. All of this happens automatically. This is the best part. I’ve got a Windows Phone. I posted those pictures on Facebook literally like a year ago. I did nothing. I came to the pictures hub after signing in once on Facebook, they were just there.

OK. Let me talk a little bit about Office. I mentioned earlier that we have Office built in, and I showed you the PowerPoint experience, but I want to show you that we have a whole hub dedicated to Microsoft Office Mobile on these business scenarios. When I go into the Office hub, the first thing you see is the OneNote area, because we think note-taking on a phone is a scenario we want to really handle in a very good way. I’ll come back to that in just a second.

If I pan over, you’ll see here is my Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents that I’ve saved on the phone. And if I pan over again, this is the SharePoint area where we give people access to the documents they’re storing with in their companies on SharePoint servers. These documents right here, I think, are from a SharePoint out to my phone. And if I pan over, I have links to these SharePoint servers, so I can go in and browse the server content, and open documents, and do real, honest to goodness, business productivity collaboration with other people at work.

I’m going to pan back over here to OneNote, and I’m going to show you the OneNote experience, and a thing that we’re trying to do to make sure this whole value add is not limited to the phone. When I go into OneNote, here is my to do list. If I’m going to edit it, I can touch on here, I can type, I can add a voice note, I can take a picture. But what I want to show you over here is that the experience is not just limited to the phone, but it translates to the PC as well. This is just a screen shot in the interest of time. But you’ll see, if I navigate to WindowsPhone.com, and sign in with my Windows Live ID, I’ll see a picture of my own phone. If my phone is lost, I can click a thing on the Web to go find it, and cause it to ring. The photos that I’ve been taking will be available there.

And right there is the OneNote notebook. And if I push that, I get a OneNote view depending on whether I have the full OneNote application installed or not. If I don’t, I have the free OneNote Web Companion that’s available and will work on any PC. And if I have the full version of OneNote, I can use that, and the content syncs between my phone and the PC through the cloud. So, my notes are always available wherever I am, whichever device is most convenient for me. And that’s just built in and free. Everybody who buys a Windows Phone gets that capability to have their notes synced through the cloud and available on any PC. That’s the Office hub.

Just a couple more. Next up, I’m going to jump into music and videos. When I go into the music and videos hub, there are a couple of things that are really interesting that are happening here. On the left, I have access to my Zune library. I could browse through music, videos, and so on. But we wanted to do this in a way that really helps people get to their music and videos with as few clicks as possible. So, right next to that, we have a history of the music and video you’ve been listening to or watching. So, I’ve recently been playing the Black Eyed Peas a lot. You know how this goes with music, you get into an album, you get into a band, you get into a playlist, and you kind of do it over and over again. Well, we made that just a couple of taps away.

I can also pan over, another really key scenario is, you want to play stuff that’s new. And, as an example here, I have some video podcasts, and audio podcasts I subscribe to. I’m a fan of the TED Talks. And when new TED Talks come out and are posted, they get synced onto my phone. A tile shows up in new, so I’m prompted. I can just click and jump right in there and watch or listen to my TED Talk.

But the other thing about this is that this experience is not limited to content that you might get or use with Zune. We have an open third party application platform which is a great way for applications to integrate right now, and here’s an example of third party applications plugging into the music and video hub. So, here I have YouTube, I’ve got a Lyrics app, and I’ve got two streaming music applications, IheartRadio and Slacker. And those applications are able to add tiles here as well. So, when I am listening to a radio station on one of those, I can just go touch the tile right there in history.

It’s a couple of taps away, and that’s how the music and video hub integrates, not just what we built into the phone, but what our partners build into the phone as well.

And then there’s a scenario that I really like. I can go in here and browse through my own music catalogue, which is you look here you see it’s not really that big. I’ve got some artists, I’ve got some albums. But what’s better, because the phone is connected, and because of a feature called Zune Pass, I can use the phone to play just about any music.

So, what I’m going to do is push the search button while I’m in music, and these guys in the crew were telling me about this band Phoenix. They’re a French band, and apparently had their music get played during an episode of Entourage. I guess people heard it, and now Phoenix is trending. I want to be sort of keeping with the trends. So, I can type Phoenix in here, and you see the search results. I can touch the artist results. Here’s Phoenix’s artist page with all their albums. And if I want to choose an album and just hit the play button, within a few seconds, I’m now going to be hitting the service.

Because I’m a Zune Pass subscriber, I don’t have to pay, I don’t have to authorize. I can pretty much listen to whatever I want. My phone is like a giant virtual jukebox that is connected, and lets me play millions and millions of tracks just by hitting the search button in music and typing what I want. It’s a killer experience. I’m really having a great deal of fun with this as a feature of my phone, in the car, with friends. I feel I can kind of stay up to date with what’s happening in music. So, that’s music.

Now, I mentioned that these third party applications can integrate into the music and video hub. And this is probably a good time just before I transition into games, to talk a little bit about third party applications.

Steve mentioned it. You’ve probably seen some of these tiles on here. I want to give you a look at some of the thousands of applications that people are developing right now. We have really terrific development tools. Visual Studio, Expression Blend, the Silverlight runtime, and literally hundreds of thousands of developers have downloaded these free tools and are working on Windows Phone applications right now.

So, I’ve opened the eBay application you see here. It automatically signed me in. It tells me I have an item up for sale and that sale is ending today. It populated with deals. I can pan over and My eBay shows me what I’ve been watching, what I have selling. It shows me messages. It shows me what searches I have saved. I recently did a search to see if I could pick up a Kinect a little early, I thought maybe on eBay, and that search was saved. Unfortunately I could not find any Kinect devices just yet. So, a few more weeks, but you get the idea.

The eBay application here is using controls and a development environment, which makes it fit right into the Windows Phone experience. So, it too is delightful.

As Steve said, we want the phone experience to be always delightful, whether you’re using our software, third party software, or no matter which phone you buy. We’re trying to make it easy for end users, but also for developers. So, that’s the eBay application.

Now, I’m going to jump in, I’ll show you one more, actually two more example applications, let me scroll down here. And two, the IMDB, I’m a big movie fan. I like going to the movies, I like renting DVDs, this whole thing. And so I’m personally super-excited to have IMDB on Windows Phone and I’ve been using this a lot.

When I go into IMDB again the user experience should feel incredibly familiar. It’s a hub-like experience. There’s what’s happening today. Here’s top news coming from IMDB. I can pan over and get a full menu of choices. And what I’m going to do here is choose under show times the movie Buried, which actually sounds kind of cool. I haven’t seen it yet. And the application uses the location and platform capabilities to hit the service, tell me what theater it’s playing in right now.

So, it’s just one touch away to find out information about the movie. If I want to read more, as you know, IMDb has a very rich database, lots of great stuff, images, trailers. I can pan over and browse the work of the people in the cask. I can explore reviews. I can look at trivia and so on. So, that’s yet another application example IMDb.

And the third application I want to show you is the one that Ralph talked about a little bit earlier, AT&T’s Uverse Mobile. One of the main ideas that we’ve had in Windows phone is enabling our partners to do meaningful differentiated value-add and integrated in with our user experience in a way that’s elegant. We like to talk about elegant coexistence, so that the user gets a natural experience that feels like it was designed intentionally.

When I bring up the AT&T Uverse experience, you see here there’s featured content, here are all shows that are available. I can type in and do a search. Here I’m going to touch all shows, and you get a sense for the kinds of things that they’re populating the service on now. I’ll scroll down there, you get a sense of that.

My girls are starting to get influenced by their older cousins. It’s this whole Hannah Montana thing. I’m sort of happy that Uverse is going to have Hannah Montana. I can get a summary. I can see the cast. I can see more shows that are like this. I can download and just start watching that show, so I have something to hand my twins and help them be a little bit entertained. That’s AT&T Uverse.

And really the point I wanted to make here is not only are we seeing a lot of really great compelling apps and services come to the device, but the user experience is consistent and delightful, and we think that’s going to be one of the things that people are going to like, and make these things much more useful.

Last up, I know you’re all interested in our gaming story. So, the last hub I’m going to show you is the games hub.

Windows Phone will be the only phone that gives access to games that work with Xbox Live. So, whether you’re a console user or just somebody who’s enthusiastic about having a phone that’s more fun, we think Windows Phone is going to really deliver on that.

When I come into the games hub, you’ll see I’ve got two invites to play a backgammon game with somebody. We wanted multiplayer gaming to be natural, front and center, because that’s what Xbox Live is about. It’s about connecting people and helping them enjoy their experiences with each other.

So, I can accept one of these game invites and start playing a game, or I can go to the collection view where I’d see all of the games that I have on the phone. You can see here I’ve got a couple installed, and a couple that are being promoted to me from the service.

The spotlight gives me news and information about Xbox Live, new releases, places to get tips and so on, and over here this is really sort of the main Xbox Live part of the panorama, the place where I can see my gamer score, I can see what achievements I’ve earned or see my avatar.

One of the things that we’ve tried to do here is make that experience as rich, complete and delightful as we can, not just for those serious Xbox Live users but for everyone.

And one of the cool things about the Xbox Live experience is the avatar. I just touch the avatar, and I’m now running an application called Xbox Live Extras that lets me do rich things with my achievements and my gamer score.

So, there’s my avatar, and actually my sister has gotten on Xbox Live. She’s not a hard-core gamer, but let me tell you she loves playing with her avatar. And she’s 40, so it’s not like I’m talking about a young sister.

I can go in here and change my features — OK, not that — don’t tell her I said that. (Laughter.)

So, what I’m going to do is go in here and change my style. This is what my sister likes to do. So, I can go in here and choose different shirts, I can choose different hats. I’m going to choose to accessorize. I might go in here and add an earring. So, let’s see what my choices are. A simple hoop sounds like a good thing. I’ll choose that. There is my avatar with an earring. I’ll say OK.

And one of the really nice things about Avatar is it makes the gaming experience more fun. You can earn prizes. So, here’s an example, I played enough to earn the MTV Video Music Awards moon man, which I have to admit I’m pretty proud to have earned. Not as proud as he is; I mean, he really seems to like this thing. (Laughter.) I’m not going to try to imitate that. I’m happy I have an alter ego to handle the dancing on my behalf.

You get the idea; the experience is fun, it helps connect people to their phone, it helps connect them to the experience we’ll have on the console, and it helps connect them to each other. These kinds of things are publicly visible for your friends to see as well. So, it’s a way of making the whole community experience part of what’s great about the phone.

I think you’re going to be curious to see some games. So, I actually have a couple I’m going to show you. The first one here — and I’m going to switch phones, because some of these games have a startup time that I don’t want to spend in the demo.

The first one I’m going to show you is a cool game called Ilo Milo. Now, the idea of Ilo Milo is to get these two characters, Ilo and Milo, to meet.

So, the game is going to finish loading up here, it’s going to zoom in. These games were developed using XNA, which is a development framework that works both on the Xbox and on the phone. And this game actually was under development for the Xbox when the developers decided, wait a minute, this would be great as a phone game.

So, I’m going to start navigating away here moving Ilo around, and you see how this is real 3D. If I tilt the phone, the accelerometer enables me to look around the world. And on the first level that doesn’t really matter that much, but later on Ilo and Milo go all over the place.

I’m going to push this button, swing over here to Milo, and we’ll get him moving. And when they meet, there’s a little happy moment, and they spin around, and you can get a sense for the performance characteristics. These phones are going to be amazing game machines, and with games developed that are happening on the Xbox platform as well we think people will have a terrific experience.

This game, Ilo Milo, will be available exclusively on AT&T phones this holiday, and it will be coming to the Xbox console a little later as well. So, that’s Ilo Milo.

Last, the last game I want to show you is a game that I personally am excited to play, because I had played it a few years ago, and now I will have it on my phone, but before I show it to you, I want to make an announcement, which is that we’re proud to say today that we will have EA available at launch as one of our Windows Phone gaming partners. EA is bringing a suite of titles to the phone, and the one that I’m going to show you first is the Sims for Windows Phone.

So, this is just finishing up loading here. You’re all familiar with the Sims franchise where you have little people and they live in little homes. So, there’s my little Joe character, and I can make him walk around and go into different rooms. I can change features of the house I’m in. I can use the phone’s capability to do things like pinch, zoom and pan around.

You notice there my fridge if flashing because I think it’s going to break, and the game wants me to repair it. It says it’s a cheap fridge, so I’m going to have little Joe go over there and fix it.

And since this is an Xbox Live — OK, there we go, my sim is not in the mood for that. I have not been taking good care of him, so now he’s going to annoy me. Yes, I get it, thank you.

One of the cool things about this, because it’s an Xbox Live game, is you can earn achievements and increase your gamer score, and share that with your friends as you go about your gaming experience.

So, that is my demo. I apologize that took a little while, but I really wanted to show you all the richness and capability, and how I can make the phone really personal and about me.

Before I leave, I do want to add a little bit of information about one additional feature. Our phones support an update mechanism, so we can get software updates out to people, and continue to improve the experience over time. And one of the things that’s nice in the way we’ve worked with our hardware partners is that all the phones will get the update.

And I wanted to announce today that we’ve heard feedback from a lot of people who have had our technical preview. There’s a feature we’re going to bring onto the phones in early 2011, copy and paste. This is a feature that we initially did not put into our development schedule, because we focused instead on things like automatic touching of phone numbers and touching of addresses, but we’re hearing from our customers, and we’re going to get this feature in, so everyone who buys a Windows Phone this holiday will be able to get an update with copy and paste in early 2011.

Thanks very much. Have a good day. (Applause.)

STEVE BALLMER: I hope you’ll agree that Joe’s got a lot of enthusiasm — (laughter) — but I hope you’ll also agree that what we really have done here is a different kind of phone.

I want to have just a little bit more context on that from the people who are building the hardware, because when you say the Windows Phone, you’re really talking about a range of amazingly beautiful devices from a range of folks. So, let’s hear from them before we wrap up. Roll the video, please.

(Video segment.)

STEVE BALLMER: There you have it, the Windows Phone, a different kind of phone, a phone that is really designed to try to be always delightful, wonderfully personal, and help people get in, out, and back to life.

We hope you’ll be able to join us, if you’re here in person, join us upstairs, and certainly we would encourage all of you to get your hands, starting November 8th here in the United States, on a Windows Phone, because at the end of the day, there’s nothing quite like the delightful experience and the personal experience of being hands on.

Thanks to all our partners, thanks to all of you today. We appreciate it. Have a great day. (Applause.)

END