Windows Phone 7 Series Announced

At the Feb. 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled the Windows Phone 7 Series, the company’s next platform for mobile phones. Although most technical details, such as development capabilities and restrictions, will not be revealed until Microsoft’s MIX conference in Las Vegas in March, Microsoft expects that consumers will be able to purchase phones based on the Windows Phone 7 Series before the end of 2010.

According to Andrew Lees, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Mobile Communication Business, Microsoft began reevaluating its mobile strategy 18 months ago and decided to “hit the reset button” by halting work on the existing Windows Mobile platform and basing the Windows Phone 7 Series on a new core OS platform with a new user interface and components from Zune and Xbox Live for music and gaming.

A key feature is an interface that uses dynamically updated “live tiles” that replace static icons and allow Windows Phone 7 to present both Web and phone content to users in real time. Combined with the live tiles are “hubs,” such as People, Pictures, Games, Music, and Video, which bring together related content from the Web, applications, and services into a single view to simplify common tasks. For example, the Office hub provides a single point of access for Office, Outlook Mobile, OneNote, and SharePoint Workspace. (See the illustration “Windows Phone 7 Series Prototype“.)