Microsoft officially unveiled its Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system Monday, announcing that it will be available on a total of five devices in the U.S.

Windows Phone 7 handsets from AT&T and T-Mobile will begin shipping in November, while devices from Sprint and Verizon will be available next year. All the devices announced Monday will run a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, Microsoft said.

At a New York launch event, Microsoft chief executive characterized Windows Phone 7 as a means to keep in touch but not be tied to your phone 24-7. “Get in, out, and back to life,” Ballmer said. The experience should be “delightful.”

AT&T will support three Windows Phone 7 devices—the HTC Surround, the Samsung Focus, and the LG Quantum.

The HTC Surround includes a 3.8-inch touch screen, and is the first smartphone to include integrated Dolby Mobile and SRS surround sound speakers, AT&T said. It has 16GB on onboard storage, a kickstand on the back, and a 5-megapixel camera. It is the “perfect device for media and gaming enthusiasts,” Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, said at the event.

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The LG Quantum (above) has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a 3.5-inch screen, and 16GB of onboard storage. It also includes a pre-loaded app called Play To, which allows users to wirelessly stream videos, music, and pictures from the phone to DLNA-enabled TV, stereo, Windows 7 PCs, and other consumer electronics devices.
Samsung Focus with Windows Phone 7

Finally, the Samsung Focus (right) will be the thinnest Windows Phone at 9.9mm. Its Super AMOLED touch screen will make the Focus the “best-looking screen on any Windows Phone,” de la Vega said. It also includes a 5-megapixel camera and 8GB of onboard storage.

AT&T Windows Phones will also include a U-verse app that allows users to download and watch TV shows on their devices, de la Vega said. The app has been an entertainment option on AT&T phones since earlier this year, but it will now be available on all Windows Phone 7 devices for a monthly fee. It will also work on Xbox 360.

The Samsung Focus will debut on Nov. 8; the Quantum and Surround will be available “for the holidays.” All AT&T phones will be sold in AT&T stores and online for $199.99 with a two-year contract.

T-Mobile, meanwhile, will release the HTC HD7 and the Dell Venue Pro.

The HTC HD7 includes a 4.3-inch, 800-by-480 LCD screen on the front and a kickstand on the back. The Venue Pro also looks big: it has a 4.1-inch screen and 5.1-megapixel camera.

In all, Microsoft announced nine Windows Phone 7 phones on Monday, the remainder of which will be available in Canada, Mexico, the U.K., Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Singapore, and Australia. It will debut in some European markets on Oct. 21.

Electronics Arts also announced the first wave of games coming to Windows Phone 7, including “Need for Speed Undercover,” “Tetris,” and “The Sims 3.” All EA games for Windows Phones will be Xbox Live-enabled.

The Windows Phone 7 interface, meanwhile, includes tiles on the home screen for People, Music and video, Photos, Games and Office. Facebook photos, music and contacts are pulled into the phone and distributed across Hubs. It also brings together many Microsoft products, like Xbox, Zune, Office, and Bing. Copy and paste functionality will be available as an update in early 2011, Microsoft said Monday.

For more details, see PCMag’s full hands on and slideshows of the HTC Surround, the LG Quantum, Samsung Focus, HTC HD7, and Dell Venue Pro.

Microsoft has released nine security bulletins, four of which include a maximum rating of critical, addressing a total of 13 vulnerabilities.

Several of these are serious, but there are important mitigating factors on them, and users of the most recent products (especially Windows 7 and Office 2010) are least affected.

Among the four critical bugs is vulnerability in a print spooler service that could allow remote code execution. Microsoft said that this vulnerability is already being exploited in the wild, but there are some important mitigating factors. If a system has the print spooler shared over an RPC interface—not the default configuration—then a remote attacker can execute remote code with a malicious print request. The attacker has to be able to access the share, which means the attacker almost certainly has to be on the local network. The flaw is rated critical for Windows XP and important for all other Windows versions.

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The second vulnerability affects the MPEG-4 codec. Most Windows versions are affected by this vulnerability, which allows an attacker to take control of a system and either open a malicious MPEG-4 media file or receive a stream with the malicious content. Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Itanium systems (both of them) are not affected. Microsoft also said that actual code execution would be unlikely on Windows Vista due to additional heap mitigations in that system.

Microsoft also pointed to a unicode scripts vulnerability. This is an unusual vulnerability in that it affects Office and Windows. All Windows versions other than Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are affected. Office versions XP, 2003, and 2007 on Windows are affected, but not Office 2010 or Mac versions. The vulnerability comes by way of a malicious font on a Web page or document that supports embedded OpenType fonts. Microsoft rates consistent exploit code of the vulnerability as unlikely.

A final issue affects Microsoft Outlook. Outlook versions 2002, 2003, and 2007 (not 2010) are vulnerable to compromise by a malicious e-mail message when connected to an Exchange Server in Online mode. Outlook 2002 connects in Online mode by default and is therefore rated Critical on this bug, but 2003 and 2007 connect by default in Cached Exchange mode and are not vulnerable in that configuration. Furthermore, Microsoft said that consistent exploit code of the vulnerability is unlikely.

There are also five vulnerabilities rated “important”:

* MS10-065: Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) Could Allow Remote Code Execution—All versions of Windows are affected by at least one of three separate vulnerabilities in IIS (Internet Information Services). The only one that is capable of remote code execution is a request header buffer overflow on servers with FastCGI turned on; this error affects only Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Most systems are only subject to denial of service. In any event, Microsoft said that functioning exploit code for this vulnerability is unlikely.
* MS10-066: Vulnerability in Remote Procedure Call Could Allow Remote Code Execution—A user who connects by RPC to a malicious server could be compromised and remote code executed on his system. Only Windows XP and 2003 are affected.
* MS10-067: Vulnerability in WordPad Text Converters Could Allow Remote Code Execution—Wordpad on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is vulnerable to remote code execution if the user opens a malicious document file.
* MS10-068: Vulnerability in Local Security Authority Subsystem Service Could Allow Elevation of Privilege—The LSASS service in almost all versions of Windows is vulnerable to compromise through malicious LDAP messages.
* MS10-069: Vulnerability in Windows Client/Server Runtime Subsystem Could Allow Elevation of Privilege—Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 are vulnerable to compromise through memory assignment errors in the CSRSS.

There are also the usual updates to the Malicious Software Removal Tool and Windows Mail Junk Filter. Another update (KB2398632) is a regression fix, addressing an as-yet unspecified problem in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 introduced last month by MS10-053.

Finally, another update (KB2141007), which is specified as “non-security” but sure seems security-related to me, “strengthen[s] authentication credentials in specific scenarios.” This last fix will apply to Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP.

The next Microsoft Windows operating system should put everything—and I mean everything—in a sandbox.

There was a time when I disagreed with the idea that the core of Microsoft’s next major operating system, Windows 8, would be a hypervisor, or virtualized machine monitor. Now, however, I see the beauty of this approach, especially for consumers.

An operating system that runs everything as a virtualized machine could be one of the most significant and beneficial steps Microsoft has ever taken in the continuing development of the Windows platform. Plus, there is evidence, going all the way back to the early days of Windows 7, that this is the exact direction Microsoft has been going in all along.

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When I met with Windows executives at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in October 2008, they told us about the newly componentized nature of the operating system. For Windows 7, this meant a peeling away of many things that had been intrinsic to the OS. So, all of the apps that used to come with it—the movie and DVD creation tools, messaging, and even e-mail—would now be optional. Even before Microsoft took a hatchet to Windows 7, the company had to figure out how to disentangle Internet Explorer from the operating system’s core. Now, at least in the European Union, you can choose to have other browsers pre-installed on your desktop.

While these are mostly minor changes that do not get to the true core of the OS, they do, in their small way, help clear the path for Windows 8 to become the first fully virtualized Windows. I also have a theory that Microsoft has been working to reduce the size of the core OS dramatically (though the company has gone on record, saying it hates to talk about the kernel) and, even as it adds features and functionality to the interface, make it smaller, too. If you look at what’s possible on 1MB Web pages, you can see that everything Microsoft is doing on Windows 7 is little more than calls to the core OS with some lightweight graphics work on the front end. Even flashier features, like see-through panes, are really off-loaded to powerful graphics CPUs.

My point is that Windows 8 can, essentially, be a lightweight core (or kernel) and even a lighter-weight interface. Everything else can be a virtual machine. Here are the benefits.

If every single thing that runs on top of the operating system is a virtual machine, then applications, drivers, files, Web browsers, and the pages you view can all run in sandboxes, protected from each other and incapable of harming the OS. It’s easy to shut down virtual machines, and in Windows 8, I could imagine that technical functions, such as launching and closing virtual machines and even accessing system hard drives and peripherals outside the virtual machines, could be user friendly. In other words, consumers would have no idea that they’re running a series of virtual machines. They’d see a “What’s running” window, with a bunch of buttons next to each item that lets them pause, stop, or turn off the app, browser, etc.. They could still do it the old-fashioned way by selecting “Close” or “Exit” from a drop-down menu, but so many people are familiar with Windows Task Manager that they might appreciate this level of control.

Hardware control and mounting drives across virtual machines can be tough, but I think Microsoft can get this worked out by launch time. One option would be to offer a new hardware control panel or “Sharing Center.” This consumer-friendly interface would give consumers the option of sharing or shielding hardware and drives across all virtualized machines. Most of the time, you’ll want full, cross-machine access. Sometimes you won’t. Maybe, for example, Dad doesn’t want junior to access the NAS and possibly mess up the photo and video archives. In this new control panel, he could give Junior access to certain drives only when he uses certain apps (runs certain virtual machines). To Dad, this will appear like basic user-level control settings, but to the OS, it’ll be a complex system of levers for virtualized access and user control.

Another obvious benefit of an all-virtualized OS is security. If you’re browsing the Web and malware tries to attack or overtly suggest you install it to protect yourself, that nastyware simply won’t get further than the browser sandbox. This new kind of OS could kill the security software industry.

The biggest and, perhaps, most significant benefit, though, is that the Registry dies. Windows would no longer keep track of every app, device, call, and DLL. The OS will be done carrying the applications’ water. Virtualized apps and hardware will only be allowed to store local XML files that tell them something about the base hardware and where to find locally-stored files. Device drivers already get their Device Stage information from just such an XML-like file. I see no reason why this couldn’t work for everything else.

I know some people will say that there’s little reason to wait for Microsoft to build this mythical virtualized OS—not when Google Chrome for the desktop is right around the corner. Chrome will be very light and rely heavily on cloud-based apps to get stuff done. From a security standpoint, it’ll already have a leg up on Windows 7. However, huge questions remain regarding power, usability, and always-on access to critical documents and files. Most consumers will, I’d venture, still look to Microsoft and Windows for their next OS. However, if Microsoft doesn’t do something radical like what I’ve proposed, there will be fewer and fewer people who will walk that well-worn path.

Virtualization is already a great tool for businesses, but the smart money is on making an operating system that sees the world in tightly-controlled sandboxes. This is how Microsoft will pave a new road for Windows users in this still young 21st century.

Here’s a walk down memory lane with Windows 1.0 and me.

Windows 7
Windows version 1.0, which did not set the world on fire, is now 25 years old this month, and I’d like to share a few remembrances of the OS.

First of all, it was useless. Like, seriously useless. But it was strangely interesting at the same time. You had to have a special graphics card to run the thing, and when compared to DOS, it did look better although it was not as attractive as the Mac OS or anything done today including Linux GUI’s. I wonder if there is a machine in existence that still runs it.

Steve Ballmer made a hilarious video promoting Windows 1.0 like a used car salesman.

When it shipped in 1985, the product had its sights not on the Mac, but OS/2 which Microsoft was co-developing. The company finally decided that the success of OS/2 was not in the best interests of Microsoft, so it did this parallel development. But originally, in 1983, when the product was first announced, it was a panicky reaction to the 1982 Comdex announcement of VisiOn by VisiCorp which was a similar shell idea.

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At first, Microsoft called it “Interface Manager.” Later, a marketing guy in the company came up with the name “Windows.” The thing wasn’t originally designed as an OS but as a shell program with a zippy GUI that could manage all of the device drivers through a common API. People forget that by the mid 1980’s device drivers for peripherals were a nightmare. Interface Manager, now Windows, would take care of this problem.

The product roll-out centered around a huge “celebrity” roast of the product at the 1985 Comdex. I was hired to be the roastmaster. The idea was that because the product was so late, humor needed to be injected. Like all roasts, the material was professionally written by a bank of comedy writers whom I gathered. The material consisted of typical “roast” jokes. Only one guy, the then CEO of Businessland (long since defunct), refused to use the professionally written material and decided to do his own presentation. He didn’t even try to be funny, and I suspect he didn’t actually know what a roast was. Everyone else played along, and it was quite humorous. I recall one of my lines: “When they began coding the product, Steve Ballmer still had hair.”

One curiosity from the event is that Microsoft wanted to have fog envelop the rollout and had about a dozen buckets of water into which they tossed dry ice. Curiously, the air is so dry in Las Vegas, where the event was held, that the water vapor dissipated instantly. It was quite funny, as everyone was baffled by the phenomenon.

The original product came with various small programs, such as a calendar, calculator, clock and notepad, plus a few games. These evolved into what are now the accessories.

A slew of interim versions of Windows products, many collectible (I think), were rolled out before the product began to get traction. It all led up to Windows 95, now 15 years old, which catapulted the OS into prominence. Microsoft played with the idea of chip-specific versions of Windows with Windows286 and Windows386. At one point, the company talked a big game about making the software portable and had versions running on the PowerPC chip and other non-Intel platforms. This direction was eventually scrubbed. Through all these changes, it has developed into the Windows we know today.

Happy Birthday Windows!