Other Mobile Platforms

Even after Windows Phone 7 Series launches in late 2010, Microsoft will continue to develop and sell several other mobile platforms and technologies.

Windows Mobile 6.5.x. Enterprise customers have custom and line-of-business applications built for the current Windows Mobile platform and will not be able to migrate those applications to Phone 7. Moreover, at launch, Phone 7 will not support deployment of applications except through the public Marketplace. Consequently, Microsoft will continue to sell and support Windows Mobile 6.5.x—which might be rebranded Windows Mobile Classic—for some unspecified period of time after late 2010. In Feb. 2010, Microsoft released an updated SDK for Windows Mobile 6.5.3.

Starter Edition. Microsoft has confirmed that it will sell another OS called Windows Phone 6 Starter Edition directly to handset vendors and through embedded redistributors such as BSquare and MediaTek that sell to mobile handset makers. Although Microsoft hasn’t disclosed many technical details about Starter Edition, it will support a limited set of cellular data standards, including the 2G standard GSM (used around the world, mostly for voice and text); the 2.5G standards CDMA 2000 1xRTT, EDGE, and GPRS (used in various countries, these standards offer enough bandwidth for data updates and slow Web browsing), and the 3G CDMA EV-DO Revision A (used by Sprint and Verizon in the United States) and TD-SCDMA (used primarily in China). It will come in editions with and without Office Mobile.