One of my favorite features in Apple's iOS is the quietly-hidden capability to take screenshots. Back when I was performing deep dives on iPhone apps for stories, the feature was just there, and it worked. Outside of CNET, it let me do things like grab photos from web sites (prior to that feature was officially added), and put together fast step-by-step how-to guides for buddies and family, turning the device into less of a consumptive tool, and into some thing that would aid me get work carried out without a pc.
But in the past couple of months of me putting Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 via its paces as a primary device, I've been missing the feature dearly. So naturally, I asked Microsoft if it was on the short list of features to be added later on down the line.
The short answer? No.
"I have by no means sat in a user group--and I sit in plenty of user groups, plenty of retail groups--I've by no means heard an end user go 'why can't I take a screenshot of that?'" Aaron Woodman, director of Microsoft's mobile communications company, told CNET in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show last week.
Well ahead of a screenshot tool can be a laundry list of features Microsoft plans to add, which includes the ones competitors have already put out, which Woodman referred to as "gaps."
"One of the reasons that personally pulled me over to the Windows Phone space was that there's lots of choices to make," Woodman said. "It's not like we didn't know copy and paste was a feature that people could potentially want, it's a question of how crucial it's to the user experience. When can you get to it?"
According to Woodman, it is also not constantly the users who support Microsoft decide which features must be fast-tracked. "We do a great deal of things for reporters," Woodman said. "I would argue things like the Mac connector software--the software that lets you take your Windows Phone and connect it to an Apple PC of some form, and essentially pull over music from iTunes and photos and that type of stuff--it wasn't built because we thought there was a considerable marketplace chance for Mac loyalists out there who were dying to acquire a Windows Phone. It was built due to the fact reporters would show up with Macs," Woodman said.
The other half of the equation, Woodman explained, is that developers who wanted to take screenshots of their applications have had the means since the introduction of the Windows Phone 7 SDK. "There's a ton of ways to do it in within the emulator, so application developers have no dilemma with that," Woodman said.
If you are thinking to yourself, "this is a niche feature," look no further than Damn You, Auto Correct, a internet site that popped up back in October of last year and is now up to a lot more than 1,300 posts containing unintentionally humorous instances of the iPhone's autocorrect feature gone wrong, snapped and sent in by users.
Nevertheless, something that would let you snap photos of text conversations is one thing. Where Woodman said some problems could arise is with capturing specific kinds of content if there's copy-protection involved.
"The reality is, we have a DRM requirement for our marketplace, which makes things like HDMI and those kinds of things out, additional challenging," Woodman said. "We've made a option to have a more protected set of content on the phone and available to customers, so we do have restrictions within that," he said.
What that would mean for such a feature is that you wouldn't have the ability to snap a shot of what you had been doing if there was a copy protection layer in location. This is comparable to what Apple does with the built-in screen grab software in Mac OS X when movies are playing inside the DVD player application.
Woodman said the feature could wind up in a future create of the OS software though. "Not that we couldn't technically do it. I mean, at the end of the day it is software," he said. "We could surely select to do screenshot capabilities if you're not in these three experiences."
Windows Phone 7's 1st software update since its launch late last year is just around the corner. Besides the addition of copy and paste, you can find out far more about what type of benefits it'll bring to things like application load times as well as the Marketplace search tool in our other chat with Woodman from last week.
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