January 24, 2012

Windows Phoneification will get you sooner or later, even if you never buy a Windows Phone at all. The first step was, obviously, the release of Windows Phone cellphones. But since Android and iPhone are much more popular it is rather unlikely you will have contact with them. However, many people have Xbox at home, many people use Windows-powered PCs at home and work, and now the look and feel of Windows Phone – tiles – is spreading like a disease.

While it may be understandable why Apple is iOSinizing the Mac OS: the huge success of iPhone and iPad. It is strange why Microsoft is pushing the user interface of very unpopular smartphone. Windows Phone has only 2-3 % of the global smartphone market. And they’re pushing it to cash cows like Xbox (Windows Phone-like update pushed at the end of last year) and Windows (starting with Windows 8 later this year). But well, it’s beyond the point: the fact is Microsoft is doing it, never mind users being angry about it.

So let’s take a look how Windows Phoneification looks like in Xbox now, after latest major update!

Look at this, doesn’t it look like Windows Phone tiles? Yes it does!

There are even bigger horizontal tiles.

And you can use also tile-based television (over Internet naturally).

Social network integration is also included. Typical also for Windows Phone that also integrates both Facebook (where Microsoft invested hundreds of millions) and Twitter (that is so popular that Microsoft can’t ignore it).

On Windows Phone if you hit the search button you get Bing page with some random background. Not surprisingly, the latest Xbox update also gets Bing page.

But how deeply does Windows Phoneification go when it comes to user interface elements?

Well, I checked it out, and noticed that it’s not deep. While user interface elements of Windows Phone are all typically square, not so in Xbox – they are still old-style and round.

One more thing: if you do typical hand waving to your Kinect, then you can move around new tile-based user interface of Xbox also with hand gestures (note the hand icon).

Can you imagine having tiles everywhere, also on your personal computers? If you can’t, then buy Apple hardware only and you may be able to avoid it, but since many companies and people still buy Windows powered computers, we will see many more tiles. And also because soon-to-be-released Windows 8, that is also tile-based, supports not only Intel x86 processors but also ARM processors. So we will see also tile-based touch tablets aplenty.

While you may hate tiles, consider this: yes, it’s true that in the case of video games for Xbox usually users have immersive gameplay experience and users don’t care about the Xbox dashboard interface, but since Microsoft has released (mainly for developers) a Kinect sensor for PC, we may soon see many PCs with both multitouch and 3D hand-gestures control and then tiles may come in handy.

Conclusion: 2012 will be the year when Windows Phoneification of Microsoft user interfaces will be completed by Windows 8 release. But you can see already in current Xbox that even if you don’t have Windows Phone, you might not be able to avoid it.

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