Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860
via Laphams Quarterly

So last week, Paul Thurrott posted ‘near-final’ screenshots of Windows Phone 7.
I have the same opinion now, as I did last month when I posted and reacted to Edward Tufte’s thoughts on the mobile interface design.
They’re still just wireframes.
Jack Moffett astutely observed, “There isn’t enough variation between what is tappable and what isn’t.”
Just to be clear, this isn’t me wanting or expecting the WP7 interface to be shiny and polished like iPhone interface. There’s many ways to design a GUI, and these just don’t look designed. At all.
It’s impossible to ignore what you’ve seen from your competition, but I’m hoping that the Windows Phone 7 team didn’t deliberately rage against the machine and decide to reject all implied dimensionality within the WP7 interface. If you want things to look clickable, you need to make them look, um, clickable. This doesn’t mean you need to use bevels, gradients, reflections and gloss. A lot can be achieved using just one of those effects.
A minimalist interface would be amazing, but WP7 isn’t minimalist, it’s empty.
Which brings me to my next point about WP7. In an interview with Steve Jobs back in the 80’s, he comments that “… they [Microsoft] don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture to their products …”
When first watched the interview, I understood what he said in theory, but it wasn’t until I saw the WP7 screens that I truly ‘got’ what Jobs was saying. The WP7 interface is completely uninspired and has a complete lack of culture.
Given WP7’s lack of real design, I was shocked at tweets from Khoi Vinh and AisleOne:


I’m waiting for another company to give Apple some real competition to the iPhone. I love Apple products, but Apple needs competition and there’s so much more room to innovate with the mobile space.
Let’s not get excited over wireframes posing as finished designs.

Gizmodo reviews Microsoft’s new mobile phones for hipsters:

It’s smart for a company to control its focus in designing a device, and that’s what Microsoft has done here. Messaging and social media are the Kin. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t come with a mapping application (there isn’t a native one, despite the presence of a GPS receiver.) It doesn’t mean that the browser shouldn’t have tabs, or a rendering engine that isn’t excruciatingly slow. It doesn’t mean that there should be no way to watch any web video of any kind, or that the phone should be arbitrarily tied to Microsoft’s Bing search service. It’s no excuse for excluding any kind of calendar.

Kids don’t do maps and browsers and shit like that, yo! They’re all up in all those social networks, hundreds of them! (read: Twitter and Facebook)
And regarding no calendar, I like this one from the comments:
“I can understand the lack of a calendar. Have you ever seen a hipster in a hurry? They don’t have appointments.”