It appears to have been a successful launch for the Windows Phone 7 platform yesterday, as one of the handsets has already sold out. T-Mobile is no longer able to immediately fulfill orders for the HTC HD7 phone.
The HD7, T-Mobile’s first phone to use the new Microsoft mobile platform, is now showing up as unavailable on the mobile carrier’s website. The product listing says “item is not available for immediate shipment.”
Because of the way Microsoft introduced the new operating system – rolling it out to multiple phones at the same time, making it impossible to spark huge interest in any one particular phone – it’s hard to gauge exactly how much of a frenzy yesterday’s launch was.
However, both AT&T and T-Mobile, which are the providers with available devices right now, said they saw a high amount of consumer interest in the new platform.
Windows Phone 7, of course, has a long road ahead of it. Over the last two years the smartphone market has become absolutely dominated by the duo of Android and iPhone. Customers are intimately familiar with those two operating systems and look to them as the best offerings on the market today.
Microsoft is doing what it needs to do, though, which is to hit the reset button on its mobile technology. Windows Phone 7 was built completely from the ground up. That’s in contrast to other operating systems, like the Blackberry OS. Research in Motion introduced a new version of the Blackberry software earlier this year to compete with Googl and Apple.
The only problem was it was nothing more than an incremental update over the previous OS. It still had the same clunky architecture that Blackberry has had for decades and it felt like an old platform. Microsoft put more time and effort into creating something that actually looks new and hip.
There’s no way of knowing how many HD7 phones were stocked for yesterday’s launch, but anything that sells out in one day shows serious interest among consumers.
