Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke to an enthusiastic crowd at Wednesday night’s keynote address, summarizing the company’s success in 2010: “We have taken our biggest step toward transforming entertainment for the whole family.”
The star of the show was the Xbox gaming system, which has been the #1 selling console for the last six months and whose Kinect gestural interface system sold over eight million units during the holidays. In additon to the impressive demonstration of gestural controls using the Kinect, Microsoft has also added a host of voice-activated commands to control content. Starting this spring, XBox LIVE users can use Kinect to navigate controller-free within Netflix and Hulu Plus, in addition to the Zune video and music marketplace already available.
Microsoft was also promoting its exclusive deal with ESPN3 that allows XBox LIVE users to access their content. The real game changer here is tapping into the XBox social utilities so that fans can interact live while viewing ESPN3 content.
Ballmer got a laugh when he was replaced onscreen by a giant avatar of himself to introduce “Avatar Kinect,” a new service coming this spring. With face recognition, body tracking, facial expression mirroring, and 15 “creative sets” for avatars to inhabit, it’s basically an animated chat service … but it looks pretty fun.
While Xbox delivers entertainment and social media to families’ biggest screens, Microsoft is trying to lasso the small-screen market with the Windows Phone 7. The demo revealed a snazzy device, designed to delight smartphone customers” and simplify common phone tasks. It’s currently only available on AT&T, but coming to Sprint and Verizon in the next few months, along with some incremental improvements.
The user interface is stylish and colorful, and substantially different than the “sea of apps” to which we’ve all become accustomed. It’s built on a “live tile” concept, where the main screen provides an immediate view of constantly-updated squares that adjust to display the incoming data from the user’s social network and calendars.
Ballmer mentioned several times that “job #1 is getting people to see this phone,” which may be code for “no one is buying it yet.” It is a crowded marketplace between Android and Apple and the jury is still out on how this viable competitor will perform.
Ballmer & colleagues also unveiled a tableful of new Windows 7 PCs, as well as some prototypes for the next operating system. Several PCs use Intel’s new second-generation core processors or AMD’s new Fusion processors, allowing six to nine hours of battery life.
Improvements to the touch screen on the Windows Tablet PC include “palm rejection,” so the screen can differentiate between intentional stylus use and accidental hand touch, and “ruggedized” Gorilla Glass screens.
The Microsoft Surface had a predictable host of upgrades, the most interesting of which was the new “Pixel Sense” technology. Infrared sensors across the whole screen mean each pixel is a camera, so it can provide intense resolution and even read documents you set on the screen. Expect to see Microsoft Surface and Pixel Sense show up in marketing, displays, and a variety of commercial applications in the next few years.
Microsoft discussed Windows’ next incarnation, which will support System on a Chip (SoC) architecture, and displayed the super-tiny SoC motherboards. They also announced new partnerships for the next version of Windows to support SoC architecture from Intel, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, and Texas Instruments.
In all, Ballmer celebrated a year of innovation, but failed to reveal any big surprises: No tablet and no real revelations about Windows 8.
