Microsoft overhauls mobile strategy

One of the biggest stories from Barcelona this year was Microsoft’s move to up its game in the mobile space with the unveiling of its next generation mobile platform – the carefully, if clumsily, named Windows Phone 7 Series.

The new moniker is a conscious move away from the old Windows Mobile branding, and Microsoft is keen to point out that the change is more than cosmetic, having adopted a rip and replace attitude to the development of the new platform.

Windows Phone 7 offers a more visually appealing layout than its predecessors, featuring dynamically updated live tiles, which show users real time content updates. A user could create a tile of a friend and gain a readable, up-to-date view of a friend’s latest pictures and posts from the Start screen.

The platform is also making much of the aggregation trend sweeping the industry at present. Windows Phone hubs bring together related content from the web, applications and services into a single view built on specific themes: People, which brings together relevant content based on the person, from services such as Facebook and Windows Live; Pictures, which allows users to share pictures and video to social networks; Games, which integrates with Microsoft’s Xbox Live platform; Music + Video, which integrates with Zune content; the Marketplace app store, and Office.

Every Windows Phone 7 Series phone will also come with a dedicated hardware button for Bing, Microsoft’s search service, providing one click access to search from anywhere on the phone, including the most relevant web or local results, depending on the type of query.

The company said handset manufacturers have already started building phones using Windows Phone 7, with the first phones to be in stores by Christmas 2010. Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC, HP, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Qualcomm are behind the initiative, as well as operators AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, SFR, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telstra, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone.