Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series Has Coming

This week at Mobile World Congress, Microsoft showed off its new phone platform for the first time. Everything that we knew and loathed about Windows Mobile is gone. Even the name is different. It's now "Windows Phone 7 Series."

Apple iPhone move over because Microsoft has now fired a shot over the bow with their intention to release Windows Phone 7 Series. This will be a new type of smart phone designed to slay Apple, and take over the smart phone market. This could be on of Microsoft's most risky venture to date, and it would also turn out to be the most profitable. It would seem that MS is scrapping all of their previous cell phone starts and fits and is now coming out with something altogether completely new.

Firstly, MS has rebuild windows mobile from top to bottom. With the 7 Series smart phone the home screen has been completely redesigned right along with the user interface experience. Xbox Live and Zune have been roped into the integration, as well as greatly a improved features to expand your social networking. The usual startup screen is history now, and instead what you find are tiles that make it very easy to scroll up and down and from side to side, making it quite easy to make a custom launch, links contacts, and any personal widgets you may have added.

The look and feel of the operating system has also been retooled, with a heavy emphasis on social networking which allow updates for status from many different services. It also allows for convenient jumping around to a dense cloud content, and in particular to your personal photo gallery. The integration of Xbox Live will include not only games, but avatars and profiles as well, sure to please the active gamer. The device includes an FM radio (cool!), along with Zune integration that appears as a standard copy.

It would be a mistake to think the Series 7 phone is just a rehash of their prior efforts. If you flip through the details you can see how MS has taken a much more vertical design with both the hardware and the user interface experience. Features such as CPU, clock speed, aspect ratio of the screen, screen resolution, available memory, and button layout have all been reconfigured. In addition, all of these features will not be customizable based on the carrier, and there will one single brand for the Windows Phone 7 Series. Not surprisingly, you will see a dedicated button just for Bing access... the assault on Google continues.

It seems that available carriers are numerous with such services ready to step up to the plate such as AT&T, Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange, SFR, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telstra, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone, while hardware partners include Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC, HP, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Qualcomm. It is also clear that MS does not intent to offer any third party devices. Microsoft promises that the first units will hit the market later this year just in time for the holidays.

It is pretty astounding that the largest technology company in the world has finally entered the smart phone market, almost three years after the introduction of the iPhone. But if you remember how late MS was to enter the browser and internet market this is not surprising. It seems that everything is going to be different now that Microsoft has introduced the Windows Phone 7 Series, and while I am sure there will be fits and starts along the way I expect it will make a quantum change in the way we use phones. That's it for now, check in again and I will post updates as they are available.