It’s one of the biggest announcements out of this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Steve Ballmer didn’t disappoint as he talked about the brand new re-imagined Windows mobile operating system.
The Windows Phone 7 Series looks and acts nothing like the current Windows Mobile 6.5 version and will bring together for the first time Microsoft’s Xbox Live games and the Zune music and video experience onto the mobile phone.
“Today, I’m proud to introduce Windows Phone 7 Series, the next generation of Windows Phones,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.
“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. 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.”
This turning point involves dynamically updated ‘live tiles’ to display real-time content directly, bypassing the static icons traditionally used for mobile app menus.
If you create a tile for a friend this tile will give a readable, up-to-date view of a friend’s latest pictures and posts.
In order to push its recently rebranded search engine, all Windows 7 phones will now come with a dedicated hardware button for Bing.
Official partners include mobile operators AT&T, Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange, SFR, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telstra, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone, and manufacturers Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC Corp., HP, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Qualcomm Inc.
The first Windows Phone 7 series handset will come on the market in Q4 of 2010.
By Marie Boran
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