At the Mobile World Congress 2010 on Monday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer offered a sneak peak of the Windows Phone 7 Series. The new platform signals the software giant’s intent to compete head-on with Apple and Google for mobile market share.
Microsoft is pushing an integrated-experiences message with its latest mobile platform. Phones featuring the new operating system will be in stories in time for the 2010 holiday shopping season.
“In a crowded market filled with phones that look the same and do the same things, I challenged the team to deliver a different kind of mobile experience,” Ballmer said. “Windows Phone 7 Series marks a turning point toward phones that truly reflect the speed of people’s lives and their need to connect to other people and all kinds of seamless experiences.”
No iPhone Clone
How can Ballmer speak so boldly in a mobile era where Apple’s iPhone is setting the pace and Google’s Android is rapidly emerging (not to mention RIM’s latest innovations and Palm’s webOS)? Ballmer contends that Windows Phone 7 Series takes a fundamentally different approach to mobile-phone software.
The Start screen is a prime example. 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.
Of course, Microsoft is making a full court press with Bing on Windows Phone 7 Series. 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. What’s more, Microsoft said, a special implementation of Bing search provides intent-specific results, delivering the most…