One of my favorite features in Apple's iOS is the quietly-hidden capability to take screenshots. Back when I was doing 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 pictures from sites (before that feature was officially added), and put together quick step-by-step how-to guides for friends and family, turning the device into less of a consumptive tool, and into something that would help me get work done without a computer.
But in the past few months of me putting Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 through 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 never sat in a user group--and I sit in a lot of user groups, a lot of retail groups--I've never heard an end user go 'why can't I take a screenshot of that?'" Aaron Woodman, director of Microsoft's mobile communications business, told CNET in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. Well ahead of a screenshot tool is a laundry list of features Microsoft plans to add, including 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 a lot 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 important it is to the user experience. When can you get to it?" According to Woodman, it's also not always the users who help Microsoft determine which features need to be fast-tracked. "We do a lot 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 basically pull over music from iTunes and photos and that kind of stuff--it wasn't built because we thought there was a significant market opportunity for Mac loyalists out there who were dying to buy a Windows Phone. It was built because reporters would show up with Macs," Woodman said.
