Microsoft hoping high on its Window Phone 7
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 13 October 2010, 10:38 IST
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Microsoft hoping high on its Window Phone 7
Bangalore: Releasing the successor to its Windows Mobile platform, Microsoft's highly anticipated mobile operating system Windows Phone 7 has received favorable early reviews. Officially announcing its launch, Microsoft has revealed nine new smartphones based on the new operating system with its partners, handset makers Dell, HTC, LG and Samsung and mobile operators, such as AT&T, O2, Orange and Deutsche Telekom. The new set of phones powered by Windows phone 7 includes Samsung Omnia 7, LG Optimus 7, Samsung Focus, LG Quantum, HTC 7 Surround, HTC HD7, HTC 7 Trophy, and HTC 7 Mozart. Microsoft's new software displays commonly used applications on a home screen in large blocks called tiles. The tiles are constantly updated with fresh content from the Internet, such as status updates or new entries from the user's Facebook friends. The new phones are built on the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. The OS also integrates Xbox Live in it which is dedicated to gaming. It also has Bing search engine and the users can download and play music. Facebook updates will be incorporated into a user's contacts. The new OS has reportedly turned down the high hopes of business community that was its chief source of custom. Windows Phone 7 is a consumer-focused platform with a variety of effects and non-business aspects like social networking apps and video playback. It divides the phone into six hubs and only one of them called Office is business-oriented. Pointing some of the major flaws, the Office hub includes versions of Word and Excel, but there's no cut and paste facility. It also lacks a feature to move a paragraph up a page. Microsoft has promised that the company will fix this with an updation, but will have to wait until next year. According to a Gartner finding, Microsoft has a market share of only 5 per cent in the global smartphone compared with 9 per cent a year ago. The software giant plans to spend more than $100 million on a new advertising campaign to popularize its OS. This is going to be real hard for Microsoft to bring back its customers back customers from Apple and Blackberry. The competition is tough from Apple, Google and BlackBerry and Microsoft is fighting to get into the top three with its new operating system.

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