Microsoft on Tuesday announced new features and capabilities in Windows Phone 7 Series. The company released a beta version of developer tools for the new mobile operating system Monday.
Windows Phone 7 works to consolidate common tasks and services in shared hubs so consumers don’t have to move in and out of their smartphone apps. It’s no surprise that Microsoft’s search engine Bing is built into the phone.
Every phone that uses the operating system will offer a dedicated hardware button for Bing to give users one-click access to search from anywhere on the phone. And a special implementation of Bing search provides intent-specific results, delivering the most relevant web or local results, depending on the type of query.
“Microsoft is offering a suite of technologies that in many cases developers are using anyway for either web development or Xbox development, and ties to Microsoft services that they’ve made significant investments in, like mail and Exchange and Bing and even Zune,” said Avi Greengart, an analyst at Current Analysis. “Microsoft is creating a fairly rich platform. Whether that’s enough to entice developers is an open question.”
‘Live Titles’ and Hubs
Microsoft has developed what it calls dynamically updated “live tiles” that show real-time content. This flies in the face of traditional static icons that offer stepping-stones to an application. With social networking in mind, the Start screen lets users create a tile of a friend and get a readable, up-to-date view of the friend’s latest picture and posts.
Another Windows Phone 7 differentiator is something called hubs. Hubs aim to bring together applications, services and related content from the web into a single view to streamline user tasks. Microsoft has developed six theme-based hubs: People, Pictures, Games, Music and Video, Marketplace and Office. The operating system will come with Zune integration.
As its name…